Early Literacy Resources

There are several key factors in a child’s early literacy development. When we think of how to prepare our child to read we often think of letter recognition or letter sounds and putting those together (phonemic awareness), but really it all begins at birth. Yes, birth!  When an infant is born they begin to instantly acquire language processing skills.  That doesn’t mean they start talking quite yet, but they will start to associate words with actions and emotions. One of the key factors in a child’s literacy development is simply exposure to language. So feel free to skip the goo-goo gaa-gaa talk and talk to your baby using a rich vocabulary. This stage also includes reading books to them. The pre-reading stage is the most important stage and will often determine how well a child will do in regards to their literacy strengths in later stages.  While reading to your baby, three very important developments occur. 1) You naturally use tone inflection (which will be an important part of fluency later on) 2) You expose them to more vocabulary. 3) They engage with print and hopefully fall in love with books (I think the most important part!) This is also the stage where the child pretends to read or memorize phrases from predictable books (Why I use the predictable phrases such as “Bad Dog Darla” in my picture books.) They will also start to activate their prior experience with language exposure and vocabulary to predict words in a rhyming structure or rhythmic pattern (why I also included these in my books).  Finally, recognition of letters and sound correlation begins to take place.  Now they are ready to read! I have broken down the steps to this stage below with ideas for activities and books for each!