Episode 14: Babies, Books, and Brilliance with Salley King Edwards

🎧 Episode Summary

In this episode of the Reading Symphony Podcast, I sit down with early childhood educator Salley King Edwards, whose 25+ year career spans classrooms, coaching, and national literacy work through Cox Campus.

We explore  how language, knowledge, and everyday interactions lay the foundation for reading long before formal instruction begins.

Salley shares her personal journey as both an educator and a parent navigating reading challenges, including the early signs she noticed, what she missed, and what she wishes more families understood.

This conversation is both deeply practical and incredibly reassuring: reading development doesn’t start in kindergarten—it starts from birth. And there is so much families can do, in simple and meaningful ways, to support it. 

🔗 Resources Mentioned

•  Cox Campus (free courses for families and educators) 
•  Brilliance of Babies (Salley’s book series and resources) 
• "How Knowledge Helps" (Willingham)

Transcript

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Welcome to the Reading Symphony Podcast, the place where clarity meets compassion. This is where families and caregivers get evidence-based trustworthy information about how reading develops, how to understand reading progress, and how to turn overwhelming information into simple, actionable steps that help every child thrive. I'm your host, Katie Megrian educator, parent, and relentless advocate for helping every child become a joyful, confident reader. Let's get started. Welcome to this episode of the Reading Symphony Podcast. We have a wonderful guest today, Salley King Edwards, an early childhood educator with more than 25 years of experience supporting children, families, and educators. Her career includes roles as a classroom teacher, interventionist, literacy coach, and district literacy coach, as well as work at the Smithsonian Early Enrichment Center, where on her first day the two year olds in her class schooled her in jazz. That moment cemented a belief that she carries to this day. Never underestimate the brilliance of babies. Now a mother of three, including a baby born later in life who inspired this series. Salley began writing board books when she couldn't find options that built both language and knowledge using real photographs. Her books used carefully selected topics and real world images to build conceptual knowledge, spark curiosity, and support early language development. Salley is also a content writer for the Rollins Center for Language and Literacy, and its free online platform, Cox Campus. Salley, welcome. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I would love to hear about how you got into teaching and how you ended up where you are today. My mother and grandmother were both teachers, so it was a natural progression for me. I had a series of summer jobs working with children, and when I applied to college, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, but you couldn't transfer. Into the College of Education, you could only transfer out. So luckily I chose that and the path was cemented and I love it. So you've been in education for over 25 years at what point in your career did you learn about the science of reading and how did that shift your practice? Way too late. I graduated from college with a degree in early childhood in 2000. So before the National Reading Panel report was ever even a thing. Nothing in my college career taught me anything about the science. But I did have two summer jobs that I think early on exposed me to the science without recognizing that's what it was. I worked at a summer phonics camp with a special ed department. So I learned about phonics then. And then the experience at the Smithsonian, I learned about language development. So I got both sides of Scarborough's reading rope without realizing I but I didn't really fully get there until my own child began to struggle to read, and I didn't have the tools to get him where he needed to be. And so it was a both and I got it professionally and knew enough to know that something was wrong, but I didn't have the skills that I needed to be able to help him. I knew enough to pick up on some things, but then I completely missed other things. So the thing I picked up on was the lack of rhyming. When you read with a toddler or a preschooler, they'll just start to naturally fill in the rhyme at the end of a sentence. We did a lot of nursery rhymes in the car. I was big on phonological awareness. We were constantly playing with words and the sounds of language and reading. And my daughter who's two years older she just naturally. Got it. Also because she is two years older, we were doing a lot of stuff with her to build phonological sensitivity and he just never picked up on it, I worked in the pre-K center, where he attended and I knew we were gonna need somebody who was really strong in those foundational skills. I had the privilege of handpicking his teacher. And he got the best of the best for at least two years. And still struggled. Also, my sister really struggled to read, and we know that dyslexia runs in our family. So, that was on the radar but I missed was that he did not learn his colors. I thought he was colorblind and I did not know until several years later that that was actually an early warning sign. It's a rapid automatic naming thing. I had the kid tested for colorblindness so many times, and he's a little bit of a trickster, so I didn't know what was happening. But it turns out it was a rapid naming thing. And then that same thing presented later when he was in third grade that was like the exact thing, he was the quarterback on the football team because he was the only kid who could remember the plays. And so the plays were they were visual and he was the only one who could remember'em. He's pretty smart. So his class is doing a school play. And they gave him the lead role and he had to do a solo. And he had all of these lines that he had to memorize. And it was weeks of work and we could not remember the lines, so he could remember the plays that were visual, but he couldn't remember the lines. At this point, he was still in intervention with a retired speech language pathologist who I knew from previous work. I called her and I was in tears. I said, I don't know what to do. Can you help? I dropped him off that day and I picked him up an hour later, and it was like I had picked up a different child and all she had him do was draw pictures of the lines, and that visual really helped him, but he couldn't remember the words at that point, I was working at Cox Campus, I was writing courses. I was in this world and I still was not prepared for that. I think there are little signs that. Parents who might not be educators and even those of us who aren't trained in this formally there are all sorts of things that I'm sure I missed. But those were the biggies. As you mentioned little Perry came along. And you recognized some signs in him that you wanted to respond to early. So what were those signs and what has been the impact of early intervention? Right. Okay. So my children are 12 and 10 years apart, so he's 10 years younger than his brother. In those 10 years, that's when I've done the bulk of my learning about the science and about language development and I work, we're affiliated with the Atlanta Speech School and so we learn a lot from people like Tiffany Hogan who talk about developmental language delay. I've heard her speak so many times and I've read so much of her work that it was on my radar. And because there's crossover between DLD and dyslexia. So given our family history, I've been hyper aware and I wanted to make sure that if we were gonna struggle, we were gonna intervene as quickly as possible. So with Perry, he did not babble like a typically developing baby does. He did not babble and his words were like, barely. Where they needed to be to meet milestones, but he didn't have, bilabial sounds. So the mm. And the, you know, babies typically. Bye bye bye. My, my, those are the first sounds and he didn't have those. I was concerned and talked to my pediatrician. He kind of thought I was crazy, but I was like, no, no, no. I work with a lot of SLPs. I just wanna know, if he doesn't need it, he doesn't need it. But within a few minutes of her recognizing the bilabial sound difference and the difference between his receptive and expressive, she was like, yeah, so he was in speech therapy for six weeks and then he graduated He may have gotten there on his own, but I think it was possibly a product of having much older siblings who do all the talking for you. And a family who just kind of caters to your every needs. You don't have to ask and advocate for yourself but he's doing great. I mean he's speaking in sentences now and really communicating everything that he needs. When he was struggling and he wasn't communicating there were a few books that he loved and they had real photographs and they just seemed to draw his attention more than some of the other books did. I kept looking for those, thinking, oh, let's build language. And I had a hard time finding them. Which is why I ended up writing them for him. So that is a beautiful segue to your book series. What inspired you to start writing them? So, Perry loved this book that a colleague of mine gave me, and it was called Global Babies. And it has these gorgeous photographs of babies from all over the world. But the text in the book itself wasn't inspiring to me. And so we didn't really read the words on the page, we just talked about the photographs, and I developed this way of reading with that book where we would focus on one thing at a time. So it's just these closeup images of baby's faces. You don't even see the adults but you see what they're wearing and whether they're sleeping or they're awake. And so we would talk about noses then the next time we would read, we would talk about eyes, whether the eyes were open or closed or asleep or awake. But the thing that he loved the most were the hats. These babies are from all over the world, and these hats are fabulous. The hats became the thing that he would point to. He was starting to point but not saying any words yet. And then we went on vacation and I put a hat on his head. We were about to go out on a boat and he said, haha. And like his fifth word. And at this point, like I'm a little bit worried about the language development. We haven't been to the pediatrician yet. He was probably about 15 or 16 months old at that point. And the very next day it just hit me like, this is what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna write these books for him. And I had been working on a course about knowledge building at the time, so it was in the back of my mind and I'd been reflecting on my experience at the Smithsonian a lot because we actually opened the course with the story about that. It just was like this perfect storm moment where it all came together so I started with birds, and I wrote three books about birds, and every time you read the book, you can read it for a different purpose. There are words on the page, but you could read and look for wings, or beaks or feet, or whether the bird is swimming or flying or the colors of the bird. You can just do so much with it. And so i've learned enough about language development to know a sequence. Even if it's not the same rate. And so babies learn nouns first. So with little one, I would start with nouns. And then once they're using nouns and naming those nouns, then I might add verbs. Adjectives don't really usually develop until later, so I'm not gonna go there with colors yet because they're still learning what a bird is and what the parts of the bird are. It's been really fun. So I have birds and I have insects and then my mammal series is being printed as we speak. I know you have the brilliance of baby's method, is that the method starting with the nouns? That's it. And reading it for the verbs yeah, and I think just starting with one thing at a time, so Goodnight Moon is a good example. And then another one that I love is Goodnight Gorilla. Most people have one or both of those books. If they're a board book lover. In Goodnight Moon, there is a mouse in every single picture. In every illustration there's a little mouse and he moves around the room. Anytime the great green Room is the focus, there's a mouse. You could not read the words on the page and just look for the mouse. And so then you're building that, okay, this is a mouse. Like they're understanding this is the concept. The kittens also move around a little bit and the yarn moves around a little bit. So this book wasn't written with that in mind, but it's a great one to see how that method works. So just focusing on one thing at a time, not worrying about the words on the page every single time, because you get kind of tired sometimes with the toddlers who only wanna read one book at bedtime, and wanna read it again and again and again. And this is a way to build more language with the same book. I have what I call the grownup guide, like, how do you read this book? In the how to Read section, I talk about some language tips like expanding on what a child says. And then I have a little bit in there about how to take the learning beyond the book, like go hang up a pine cone, bird feeder with peanut butter and little things like that, that can then just reinforce all the concepts. But it really does start with the photographs. Like this one, I knew I wanted to talk about feathers and so I found some really beautiful pictures of feathers. But then you can talk about feathers. On every single page. That's been the biggest challenge. I was not able to complete my amphibian book'cause I can't find the pictures I need. So that one will just go on the back burner but you should say the picture that you're looking for. So in case our audience knows just the picture. I don't wanna offend any Amphibian fans, but it's the grossest thing. I'm not afraid of anything. It is the grossest thing. I think it's called a Sicilian. It is a legless amphibian, so it looks a little bit like a centipede, a little bit like a snake. And the eggs look like eyeballs and it's really not something I would want to come across in day-to-day life, but I can't write a book without it. So if any listeners know if you have a great image of a Sicilian yes. I think that's what it's called. So to say legless amphibian. Yes. Salley King Edwards or me. And we will put you in touch because that's book needs to be written. So through the reading and rereading of these books with beautiful, vivid images about non-fiction topics, how does that come together to ultimately make reading easier for kids. When children become readers, when they are able to decode the words and can read with enough fluently to be able to support comprehension, the thing that predicts their reading comprehension is how much they know about a topic before they read. And so we also know that vocabulary at age three correlates to reading comprehension at third grade at this age, all I'm worried about is vocabulary and language and knowledge making sure with my own baby, that he is getting as much as he possibly can. I learned about receptive language, when my first two children were really little, that was when I first came to the Rollin Center. We measured the vocabulary of the children who entered the pre-K center, in Georgia we have a lottery funded pre-K and a lot of times in a small town, they are housed within the public schools. I had the luxury of being able to track these children and their data. COVID messed up the trajectory a little bit, but I was able to look at these children who entered pre-K, and story was exactly what the research says, if they came in with a really strong, receptive vocabulary, we used the PPVT Peabody Picture Vocabulary test they left with a strong vocabulary. We measured again at the end of kindergarten, and then we measured their third grade reading ability and it was often a straight line. And we also then did a lot of language intervention in that pre-K center so that we were able to really narrow the language gap for children who were entering school, and so that was really what we were trying to do was really increase that academic vocabulary that they would need to become successful readers later. If a caregiver or a family member or parent is listening to this right now thinking like, oh my goodness, like I missed the window there's always ways to intervene and close that gap. We see it a lot with children who struggle to read because then they're not reading independently yet. We call it the Matthew Effect. It's like the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The children who come in with a strong vocabulary. And our great readers just continue to grow that vocabulary because that's where we gain the most vocabularies from text. For my older son, we've done a lot of audio books. He loves a documentary. So we do a lot of knowledge building through documentaries. He's in middle school, so he's probably just now getting to the age where we could dig into some really good ones, like some of the Ken Burn series. He would love it. But even when he is tired from a long day at school and a lot of reading at school and then sports practices after school. We try to do something that is going to continue to grow that vocabulary. And if it's not reading a book, a physical book in his hand, it's gonna be listening to an audio book. The audio books I think sometimes it gets a bad rap and that it is not cheating. It is really meaningful oral language development. It may not translate to decoding or fluency but building that background does make more complex texts so much more accessible. Absolutely. And so even if they have weaker decoding skills. But know more about that topic. We've got research and I can link some studies that do bring kids into that complex text. It's not cheating to put on a Ken Burns documentary. No, it's not. Absolutely. Listen to an audio book, right? Absolutely. And public libraries. Our public library uses the Libby app, but I think there are others, overdrive and some others that as long as you have a library card, you have access to free audio books. In middle school, he seems to be fine with informational text because that's his interest, but a longer novel is something that he's struggling with now. Especially if there are narrator changes or flashbacks, he doesn't quite have the cognitive desk space to be able to tackle that. So we're trying to lean into some of those and I will let him listen to an audio book. He's just finished Hunger Games, so we were listening to the audio book as he was reading it in class as a little added layer of support. So we're doing the same thing. We've got the book in our hand and we've got the audio book in our ear. That's another idea to be reading the book alongside of them, whether it's for school or not. But to be able to engage in that oral language and have those conversations and hunger games is powerful to engage with a middle schooler who maybe is going through this phase where they're resisting reading. absolutely. I mean, we tried to limit the screens as much as possible, but in this day and age, it's really hard. He still doesn't have a phone. So his sister got one right before eighth grade, and that's when he'll get his, but there's just the draw to technology and to games is just so powerful. So thinking about the parent lens, caregiver lens, there's ways that we can make reading come alive, and I think you've given some really beautiful examples from the perspective of a mama of a 2-year-old. Making hats and bugs and flowers come to life, but also the mom of a middle schooler meeting them where they're at and engaging with them. It's exciting to think about some of the ways that are often free that we can extend our kids' knowledge. Absolutely. And I'll say too, a plug for museums. Like if you live in Boston, oh my gosh, I can't even imagine like all that you could go and explore on a weekend with your kids. I mean, when I worked at the Smithsonian, I just kept walking around with these little bitty children and I came back and talked kindergarten there, but it was like. How do you give this to every child? How do you make this accessible to everybody? And so when mine were little, we live in a really small town so we would make the trek several hours north to Atlanta to go to some museums and to get a little bit of knowledge that we couldn't get in our backyard. But they grew up with a lot of knowledge of nature and a lot of knowledge of animals and flora and fauna in the woods and things like that. It's just different knowledge, but trying to find that balance of like. Yes, let's dig into their interests, but also let's expose them to things that they might not even know they're interested in. So tell us a little bit about the work you do at Cox Campus. We are fully funded by philanthropy and the only free structured literacy program accredited by the International Dyslexia Association. Wow. So we have courses in the structured literacy suite that speak to elementary age children. We also have a dyslexia series. Then we have courses for, childcare teachers like infants, toddlers, preschool, and pre-K. We really spanned the continuum from birth to reading. We were also growing our adolescent literacy content. Anytime you take a course on Cox campus for the educators in the audience, if you need continuing ed credits, you get that evidence and you can print that out. And then if you pass the structured literacy exam, you qualify to sit for the Cape Perry so you can become a certified dyslexia. If you are a parent who is curious about what it really takes to be a reader and what skills children need as they're entering kindergarten, pre-K, there's a course called Emergent Literacy and it teaches about phonemic awareness, alphabet knowledge, concepts of print. It gives you the background knowledge. It also tells you like actionable steps to teach with your child. Amazing. That's a great one. Also anybody who's passionate about reading aloud to children, the transforming story time courses also really good because they're geared toward teachers of younger children. And then we have a great team member who is working on some parent facing materials, so hopefully those are coming. So exciting. I can't wait, and I've looked at a lot of the resources and they're so high quality. I mean I pinch myself on a daily basis. That's my job and I love it. It's so much fun. That's how I feel about this podcast. In addition the work I get to do with so many brilliant educators on a daily basis, I've learned so much in this conversation and every conversation and there's just so much generosity in the field. Oh my gosh. There really are many free resources out there, but what I've found with Cox campus is that has just so many in one place. And I know you're continually building it out, so it's very exciting and yeah, I think even if a family member or parent caregiver. Say your child just got diagnosed with dyslexia, for example, you might to go take that course just to get some of that background knowledge. We're talking about knowledge building this whole conversation. And that's true for us as parents too. We just can't know it all. Absolutely. And I think on that note, I don't think I said this, but I think it's really important for a parent who's grappling with a new diagnosis to understand it has absolutely nothing to do with intelligence. Yes. Like, let's keep saying that. Yes. It has nothing to do with intelligence and I think that my child is gifted and may have dyslexia. I think we may pursue a diagnosis this summer but he is so smart and in our family, anybody who has these reading issues is also incredibly bright. Like this child could do math in his head faster than me by the time he was in second grade. Like it's amazing. It has nothing to do, but they present in schools as average. Because they're compensating and their intelligence is helping them keep up you can be dyslexic on any range of IQ but it doesn't mean they're not gonna be successful in school, and it doesn't mean. That they're not going to be able to learn to read because we know 95% of children can if they are given the right instruction. Yes. Yeah. So well said, Salley, I learned so much from this conversation with you and it's been wonderful to get to know you Can you tell us where families might be able to find your work? Sure. The website is brilliance of babies.com and my Instagram, is just at brilliance of babies. So that's where you can find us and I'm trying to show more of the inside of the books on there they are beautiful pictures and we'll link them in the show notes as well so that you can check them out. Thank you for all that you're doing and putting out into the world, both with your own books and the work you're doing at Cox. I have felt so privileged in this journey of navigating having a child who struggl to know what I know and so the fact that you're putting this out there for other families and for other parents who need that information, I think it's such a gift. Thank you so much. It takes a village. It's true. Absolutely. Thank you so much for listening to the Reading Symphony Podcast. My hope is that each episode leaves you with more clarity about what actually helps children become skilled, joyful readers. If today's conversation was helpful, I'd be so grateful if you would follow the show. Leave a quick five star rating or review and share this episode with a friend or teacher or another parent who cares deeply about kids. Those small actions make a big difference in helping this work reach more families. You can also find resources, deep dives and practical tools for families by subscribing to my free weekly substack newsletter at katiemegrian.substack.com And you can connect with me on Instagram thereadingsymphony Until next time, take care. And remember, reading doesn't happen by accident. It develops when the right parts come together.