When it comes to teaching children to read, we probably all get a bit overwhelmed, and think let's leave it to the teachers. But there is so much we can do now, before they are even in elementary school, AND it won't even feel like teaching!!! I've been studying elementary education for three years, and since having a child of my own, I have a totally new understanding and appreciation of the things I'm learning and I want to share! So let's start at the beginning of our little ones' lives.
Ages 0-1 Years
Development: A child's literacy development begins immediately with communication and speech skills.
- Communication: cry, laugh, coo, facial expressions, body movement.
- Consonant sounds that represent words: muh for milk, or duh for dad, with little control over what vowel sound comes out.
- Consonant and vowel sounds put together to form small words: dada, mama, all done (these were some of Tugger's first full words).
- Dancing and Singing: swaying to music, using vocal chords in a lengthened way to practice singing.
- Some knowledge of how a book works: how to hold it, flip pages, pictures of familiar things, mom talks to you when you bring her the book.
- Scribble on paper: This is also directly tied to motor skill development, so they may or may not figure out scribbling by one year old. That's okay!
Activities: Here are some ideas to help your child to develop these key early literacy skills.
- This is said over and over again, but I'll say it here, Talk To Your Baby! It's so good for them to hear your voice and the changes in your tone or inflection. Talk about everything your doing: I'm going to give you a bath, we'll wash your hair, let's dry you off, oh your handsome, are you getting hungry?, momma needs to do the laundry, we pour the soap in and turn it on... See how easy and yes a little obnoxious it is, your baby will just love it!
- Read a book to them at least once a day. Okay, I wasn't very good at this when Tugger was younger than 5 months, but for sure from 6 months onward it's so great. They will probably only listen for 20 seconds and take the book away, but some reading is better than none!
- A perfect segue to the next activity. Let them have board books to play with all they want. They will enjoy flipping pages, looking at pictures, feeling textures, etc. What better way for them to learn to enjoy reading!
- Play music for them. I like a variety, and really there is no science behind this (at least not from me), but I do have one personal preference: I don't only listen to modern/pop/etc music that I would typically always listen to, I turn on the kid tunes! There are so many fun kids songs that have bouncy beats and I can just see Tugger enjoy them. Also, many children's song have silly rhymes and alliterations that are really good speech development tools (Willoughby Wallaby Wugger an Elephant Sat on Tugger! --Rafi)
- Draw and write on different surfaces. I said above that this skill set is directly related to the development of different motor skills, but practice and play can only help! They can use paper and crayons, colored paper and water on a paint brush (it shows up for a few minutes but doesn't make a mess!), chalkboards, pudding on their highchair tray, just to name a few ideas!
- Sing or say the Alphabet. Most children that struggle to read when they go into elementary school have a problem with phonemic awarness, or in other words, they can't actually hear each individual sound. For instance: they might hear da as one sound in dad rather than separating it into d / a / d. Even though we're talking about such a young age, they are learning these sounds right now, and familiarizing them with the alphabet will help. (We'll talk more about phonemic awareness in the other stages.)
These are just a few activities that I thought of, but I really want to know how you encourage reading at a young age? What are some activities you've done with your children?
---Elizabeth
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This is a GREAT post! I have 5 children ranging in age from 17 down to 20 month old twins and I wholeheartedly agree that teaching a love of reading at an early age is the key to LIFE. We basically do all of the things that you mentioned including the music because I am a music LOVER to the bone! There is also a children's "station" on Pandora that I will play through my laptop sometimes while we are independently playing we sing along. Phonics is HUGE and in my opinion the reason some children are such good readers/spellers and others struggle. For a while the school systems-at least here in CT waivered back and forth between teaching reading via phonics and using word recognition or memory. Obviously the latter is of no service to anyone because it will not help the child to work through new words they've never encountered. I haven't had any children in Kindergarten in about 6 years so I'm hoping they've returned to Phonics learning and will remain that way. Sorry for such a long comment but your post is very thought provoking and something near & dear to my heart. I would say another thing I add is the use of "busy books"--handmade felt style books, puzzles and also I'm in the process of doing felt boards for alphabets, numbers, name recognition, etc. GREAT post!
ReplyDeleteTara, thanks for the long comment! Loved it! I'm so glad that you mentioned busy books. I totally spaced them, yet they are such a great way to teach different motor development skills and sensory exploration. Phonics is definitely the main reading instruction that teachers are taught right now (at least here in Idaho). Learning sight words is only affective once you know a student has all the tools to decode through phonics, but if they haven't figured out how to decode yet, they will only become confused by memorizing words. I hope teachers aren't leaning on this practice anymore. Thanks for being such a great advocate for children's literacy, reading really is how you open up the rest of the world to children!!!
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