School Readiness: Language and Literacy

How can you help and support your child in the area of language & literacy development?  Create activities that address the following areas.

• Speaking clearly
• Asking and answering questions
• Paying attention to people and listening to people and stories
• Following directions
• Showing interest in books
• Learning about sounds in letters and words
• Recognizing letters and numbers
• Drawing pictures and trying to write and copy letters
  

Reading, rhyming, writing stories, and playing with the alphabet are activities that we are focusing on here.  Hopefully by following this blog and reading my posts, you are already well versed in things that you can do to promote language and literacy development.  I kinda talk about it a lot! :)

READ!

This activity is pretty self explanatory, but keep in mind things that I have highlighted in previous posts like asking open ended questions, prompting discussion, and pointing out letters and sight words.  Encourage kids to look at the pictures and explain what they think is happening in the story.  This is also a time to point out how to hold a book and turn the pages.  Show them different parts of a book like front cover and back cover, and author and illustrator.  Eventually you can even show things like a table of contents, index, or glossary.  There's a lot inside of a book, and those are things they may find in a school textbook.  Reading together is also an amazing time to bond!

Rhyme all the time

Point out a word in a story and encourage your child to think of words that rhyme with it.  Read a Dr. Seuss book and come up with a silly rhyme of your own.  Sing songs.  There are so many opportunities to rhyme all the time!  Just a word of warning, you may find it hard to stop once you're on a roll!

To the letter

Have some fun with letters.  Go on a letter scavenger hunt.  Choose a letter, look around, and see how many times you can find it.  You can also play a letter matching game with uppercase and lowercase letters.  Play with magnetic letters.  Read an alphabet book and search for the letters.  Chicka Chicka Boom Boom by Bill Martin Jr is a great one!

Shape up

In a previous post about the 5 magical activities to promote early literacy, I talked about how shapes and writing go together so well.  Show kids pictures of triangles, circles, and squares and ask them if they can think of letters that have similar shapes.  Go a step further and put shapes on different baskets and have kids put letter cards into the different baskets.  When storytimes start up again for me, I already have this on my list of activities to include!

Dry erase boards are magic

I don't know what it is about kids and dry erase boards.  They love them!  It really doesn't even matter how old they are either.  They just love writing on them and erasing.  Use that love.  Practice writing different letters and words.  Make pictures out of shapes.  Then make pictures out of letters.

Chalk the walk

Sidewalk chalk also holds the magical powers of a dry erase board.  Get outside and start writing and drawing!  Bonus points for making the world just a little bit brighter.

Books

Honestly you can use just about any book for these different activities or just to share together.  I hope that you've already discovered some new favorites from titles that I have shared on this blog.  If you are searching for more some good keywords are books, library, listening, talking, reading, rhyme, books in verse, interactive, alphabet, and wordless.  Yes, wordless.  These are awesome choices for kids to use to describe and create their own story.  Some of the illustrations are beautiful.  Pictures really can say 1,000 words.  Here are a couple of other titles to add on to the list of others I have shared.  Enjoy!

• The happiest book ever! / Bob Shea
• The night library / by David Zeltser ; illustrated by Raul Colon
• How to read a book / by Kwame Alexander ; art by Melissa Sweet
• Amelia Bedelia's first library card / by Herman Parish ; pictures by Lynne Avril
• Library lion / Michelle Knudsen ; illustrated by Kevin Hawkes
• Lost in the library : a story of Patience & Fortitude / Josh Funk ; Illustrated by Stevie Lewis
• High five / Adam Rubin ; illustrated by Daniel Salmieri
• Can U save the day? / by Shannon Stocker ; illustrated by Tom Disbury
• Animalphabet / written by Julia Donaldson ; illustrated by Sharon King-Chai
• Bigger words for little geniuses / Susan and James Patterson ; illustrated by Hsinping Pan
• Let's go ABC! : things that go from A to Z / by Rhonda Gowler Greene ; illustrated by Daniel Kirk
• Llama Llama loves to read / by Anna Dewdney and Reed Duncan ; illustrated by JT Morrow
• May I have a word? / Caron Levis ; pictures by Andy Rash
• LMNO peas / Keith Baker
• LMNO pea-quel / Keith Baker    
• Hike / Pete Oswald - Wordless
• Field trip to the moon / John Hare - Wordless
• Another / Christian Robinson - Wordless
• I got it! / David Wiesner - Wordless
• The carpenter / Bruna Barros - Wordless
• Imagine! / Raúl Colón - Wordless
• The typewriter / Bill Thomson - Wordless