Literacy for children

What is literacy?

It's the ability to communicate in a variety of forms: reading, writing, listening, speaking, thinking.

Many parents don't realize that when a child works a puzzle or assembles a sequence of parts, he's learning visual discrimination (how things look alike or different), a fundamental concept in being able to differentiate one string of letters (a word) from another.

Stacking toys, like Measure Up Cups, or My Busy Day teach about sequencing...a progression from small to large.

Lacing/threading toys like Giant Pegboard or Shapes and Laces, work on fine motor skills that build the muscles that will soon develop the ability to hold a pencil.

Sorting toys like Sunshine Market or Place and Trace also help with eye-hand coordination, how the eyes and hands work together.

Patterning toys like Playful Patterns help children recognize and analyze patterns in words like endings or prefixes.

All of this will be helpful to a child learning to read.

It's never too soon to get started. Even holding the youngest child on your lap for a short reading session sets up a positive association with being read to. They can learn about how a book opens, that it must be held right side up, that we read from left to right, that the symbols on the page have a meaning.

You will probably want to have a home library, one that includes a variety of genres, from rhyming books to picture books, to activity books, story books, reference books. There should be a range of authors with different writing styles and an array of illustrators. Even the font styles should vary so that g is still recognized as g.

Baby board books like Frog's Friends, Ladybug's Lesson and Baby Bear's Bedtime, and soft books like Animal Baby and Busy Baby, have interesting textures to hold baby's attention.

Once Upon a Time and My First Fairy Tales are two storybooks, and there's the What am I? series of non-fiction with interesting die-cut pages in our reference section.

We also have CDs to cultivate good listening skills, like Sounds Like Fun and Bilingual Songs -English/Spanish.

Refer to my prior article on reading aloud to your child for 15 minutes a day. It is one of the best things you can do for your child.