In the corner of the living room, in a tall, grey basket, sits a stack of nearly twenty books. As a nanny to the family that I have worked for for the last two years, this stack of books has become an important and consuming part of the proper functioning of the household.
As a nanny, I hold many responsibilities: cooking, cleaning, feeding and changing diapers. One of the more important parts of my job that takes up some time is working with the children to better use their speech skills. Now, I am no linguist and I am not a speech pathologist, but as I am deeply integrated into the culture and structure of this household, I have to help where I can.
One of my kids has a speech delay while the other is still quite young, and because they are so close in age, they impact each other when it comes to speaking. As such, one goes to therapy for assistance and we as a team learn all about what goes on in the therapy sessions in order to better assist the child with the speech delay as well as transfer any knowledge that we can onto the neurotypical child. Add on top of that, that the home that I work for is a bilingual household, so the children already hold a delay for speech as they are learning both English and Italian at the same time.
With that being said, I was sitting in the living room with the children the other day and took note of the types and structures of the books that we were reading. I found the collection of the books interesting i