31 Days to Better Reading! |
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Presented here are 31 fun activities for parents and young children (ages 3 to 5) to do together. Each activity helps your child build one or more important literacy skills. The most important part of reading, talking and playing with your child is having fun so that your child discovers a love of learning that will last a lifetime.
Here are the literacy skills your child will practice with these activities. There is an icon associated with each literacy skill for easy reference.
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Oral Language—Talk, Talk, Talk! Children need oral language skills to express their needs and ideas (speaking) and to understand new information being shared (listening). In other words, oral language is an important building block for nearly all other communication, including reading and writing. |
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Phonological Awareness—The Sounds of Language. As children start to recognize the sounds that make up words—for example, beginning sounds and ending sounds—they learn that words are made up of smaller sounds. They also learn that by changing these sounds, they can create new words. |
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Print Awareness—How Books Work. Children learning to read need to make connections between the words they hear and the words they see in print. As children explore all types of printed materials (like books, magazines and signs), they can see that pictures and written words represent real things. |
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Alphabet Knowledge—More than ABCs. It's important that children learn the names of the letters of the alphabet and, ultimately, the sounds that the letters represent. As children begin to make the connection between letters and sounds, they also begin to see that letters work together to form words. |
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Early Writing—Write, Write, Write! Early writing is connected to reading success. Scribbling, drawing and pretending to write are the first steps. Children may also use invented spelling—getting some but not all of the letters correct or leaving out letters—as they begin to make the important connection between the sounds of language and the letters of the alphabet. |
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If you prefer to download and print out the activities, then click here. Acrobat Reader, free software for viewing and printing Adobe Portable Document
Format (PDF) files, is necessary to read this file. |