Young children don’t always know how to get started when telling a story – many adults don’t either. One of our favorite ways to get children involved in storytelling is to use family photos as story prompts. You can use photo albums or scroll through photos on your phone or tablet. The goal here isn’t really a cohesive story (although that is encouraged); the goal is for your child to start sharing details, and ultimately to go beyond what is obvious, getting into the story behind the picture.
Not as in-depth as a read-aloud but not as quick as a skim, a “book walk” is a great way for kids to practice retelling a familiar story.
A book walk is a “walk” through the book, in which your child tells the story in his or her very own words, starting at the beginning. Using the picture and words your child recognizes on the page as a guide, a book walk is a great, quick strategy to help your little one practice speaking, listening, and retelling.
Print is here, there, and everywhere. Teachers call the print that surrounds us “environmental print” — and too often it’s overlooked as a learning opportunity for children because many people think that reading “counts” only when it’s done between the covers of a book. But that’s not the case.
There are even tons of foods on the market today in the shapes of letters, beyond alphabet soup. Get some and give them to your child!
Writing isn’t easy. Adults forget how hard it is because we do it all the time, but we need to remember to make writing fun so that our children want to do it.
You can create letters with so much more than paper and a pencil. When children are first learning to form letters, we encourage parents not to focus too heavily on traditional writing and instead stretch past the paper and pencil to use other, more sensory materials (say, writing in shaving cream, using blocks to form letters, or tracing letters in the sandbox!).
Predicting is one of the easiest comprehension strategies to use with beginning readers, and like many of these important early literacy skills, predicting can be taught even before children can read on their own.
Predicting as a reading strategy is actually just using pictures or text to make a guess about what will happen. Even our little ones can do this by looking at the cover of a book or the illustrations on a page, or by hearing the title read aloud.
Adapted from Raising a Rock-Star Reader by Amy Mascott and Allison McDonald.
Have a child who's just learning how to read? Here are the best books to inspire a love of literacy. You can also browse popular book lists, get our recommended reads by age, or learn more about helping your child make the leap to chapter books.
