Books Are So Important
It is all about exposing your child to printed words and spoken language. It is building your child's awareness of the relationship between symbols and sounds.
Here are a few ideas to enhance and support early literacy knowledge.
1. As early as 2 and 3 years old, show your child how to hold a book. Teach them how to look at it,
front to back and page to page. Understanding that this is a process and a necessary one at that,
is an important skill for reading.
2. Talk about the pictures with your child. This conversation increases your child's vocabulary and
language skills. An estimation exists that with 20 minutes of reading a day with your child, his/her
vocabulary will grow to over one million words. With just 5 minutes a day, nearly 300,000 words.
3. Reading with your child is a bonding moment. An opportunity to form an appreciation and desire
for reading. Hearing you read develops listening skills and can spark your child's imagination and
and open up a new world for them. Hearing the words, hearing the flow of the words and the
expression in your voice introduces your child to the fluency of reading.
4. Language is developed through reading. The more words they hear, the more vast their vocabulary
bank becomes.
5. An adventure to the library is an excellent outing for you and your child. Let your child pick out books
that fascinates him/her.
6. Games and activities that promote awareness of rhyme are excellent learning tools as well. Rhyme is
a key early literacy skill. Recognizing and producing rhyme, nonsense words are acceptable, will
assist your child not only with their phonetic skills but decoding skills as well.
7. Your child reads to you. Retelling the story using the pictures builds interest and confidence in reading.
8. Finally, a wonderful activity to promote confidence with reading is putting words to your child's
drawings. Your child is not only the author but illustrator.
Set aside a time every day to share with the your child the fascinating world of books and language.
