Module 7 includes skills and activities your child needs to be ready for kindergarten, and how you can support your child’s literacy development at home. We want you to complete this module with an understanding of what is DEVELOPMENTALLY appropriate for a four or five-year-old. We know what a good reader sounds like, but it starts with small, discrete skills built over the years. Now is the critical time to build those skills.
Early literacy skills are learned and developed before a child enters school. As the first teachers of our children and parents, we play a pivotal role in our children’s overall literacy development and readiness for school.
This module focuses on building pre-reading and reading skills NOW to ensure that your child begins to build the critical skills needed for life-long reading success. It will help you understand how familiar signs and logos can support your child’s transition to reading. We share print awareness activities to support your child’s literacy foundation growth. We also give you tools and techniques for assisting your child in recalling important information and making connections when reading.
Ensuring that early literacy practices occur, especially reading aloud to a child, will not only prepare a child for kindergarten but will affect their literary success throughout their entire education and even into adulthood.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of this module, learners will be able to:
Understand that using environmental print (familiar signs, words and logos) can support their child's transition to the print used in school.
Identify print awareness activities to support their child’s literacy foundation growth.
Identify tools and techniques for assisting their child in recalling important information and making connections when reading.
Identify strategies to support their child’s growth in learning words and phrases.
Does your child recognize and “read” environmental print?
Does your child understand how print works?
Can your child recall information and make connections when you read to them?
Can your child retell a story with a beginning, middle, and end?
Does your child ask and answer questions when you read to them?
Recognizes Environmental Print
Letters and words are all around us –not just in books! Environmental print is the print we see in everyday life. It’s the words that appears on signs, labels, and logos. Other examples of environmental print include street signs, candy wrappers, labels on peanut butter, and the K in Kmart. For many early readers, environmental print helps bridge the connection between letters and first efforts to read. Adults can take advantage of this print by using it to talk about letters, words, and print. Playing with environmental print can be quick and easy.
Does your child recognize environmental print? Do they ”read” signs? (“Hey! There is the McDonald’s”).
Does your child use environmental print in their writing?
Can your child associate letters in environmental print with letters he/she knows (“My last name starts like Walmart!”)?
Activities for Reading and Recognizing Environmental Print
Below are the activities you can do with your child to support their reading and their ability to recognize environmental print. Click on the title to reveal the activity content.
Choose a simple sign to focus on during one car trip (example: stop sign, pedestrian crossing, or one-way). Have your child count the number of times they see this sign or other signs along the way. Have your child read the sign, noticing that the same sign says the same message each time. Talk about the sound of the letters you can hear. (“The S makes the /ssss/ sound.”)
Choose a letter as you’re walking into a store. Make a game of finding things in the store that starts with that letter. For example, you can find peanuts, popcorn, pineapple, paper, and pizza for the letter P. Emphasize the letter P and its sound with each P word.
Another activity to use environmental print is making and using an enviroprint poster. Get a sheet of poster board and some ”starter” logos to create an enviroprint poster at home with the child. You can look in the kitchen, newspaper, sales circulars in the mail, magazines, etc., to find enviroprint that your child is familiar with and can ”read.” The poster should be hung somewhere in your home. Encourage your child to read it while pointing to each piece of environmental print.
Print Awareness: Understanding How Print Works
Print awareness is often called ”concepts of print” and is a prerequisite skill for reading. While it may sound simple and is something we take for granted, it must be taught to our children. They must understand how to handle books and how print works before they can access it to read it.
Does your child know how to hold a book, open it, turn pages, etc.?
Does your child know the parts of a book (cover, spine, pages, etc.)?
Does your child know the difference between letters, words, sentences?
Does your child know the direction print moves in (left to right, top to bottom)?
Activities for Reading and Understanding How Print Works
Below are the activities you can do with your child to support their understanding of how print works. Click on the title to reveal the activity content.
When reading a book with your child, you can teach them concepts of print. You can use our handout, Talking About Books, to model and teach them. After modeling, give your child the book and ask the questions on the handout. We have included a handout to help you.
One easy way to assist children in developing concepts of print is to spend time showing them:
Point to words when reading to children.
Write in front of children so they can read what is being written, and say the words as you write.
Frequently refer to the terminology of parts of a book – front, back, author, illustrator, cover, etc.
Tell children explicitly about different concepts of print when the opportunity arises.
Ask children to point out the concepts of print to check their knowledge.
Now that your child is at the age where they have the ability to concentrate and maintain attention a little longer, they will be better able to retain and recall information from stories that you read to them. They will be able to name some of the characters and tell you things that happened in the story.
They should also be able to make some connections between the story and their own life. When they can make a personal connection, they have an easier time remembering things from the story.
For example, one of my favorite stories is The Relatives Came by Cynthia Rylant. One of the personal connection that I have to this story is remembering packing our car during the summer and traveling to visit relatives. My mom would pack pops, crackers and bologna sandwiches for us to eat along the way just like the family in the story.
Here is a YouTube read-aloud of The Relatives Came for you to enjoy.
Retell a Story
Our next skill is retelling a story in the correct order. Children need to understand that print carries meaning. We need to work on listening comprehension at this stage in their development, also. We want to teach our children to pay attention as they listen to a story and think about the information the story conveys. Learning these skills will later transfer to paying attention to the information they read from a page.
Many studies have shown that children build vocabulary, use more complex sentences, and improve comprehension when frequently exposed to stories. It starts with you. The most impactful thing you can do to help develop your child’s reading skills is to read regularly to them. We will give you some strategies that will make the reading time even more impactful! Read, read, read!
Can your child retell at least three main parts of a story? (beginning, middle, end)
Can your child recall important characters from a story?
Can your child recall important details from a story?
Can your child draw conclusions and make connections while you read to them?
Drawing conclusions: Authors don’t always explain everything that is happening in the story. Readers use story clues to figure out what is NOT said by the author.
Making connections: Making connections is when a reader reads something that reminds them of something they have read or something that has happened in their life or the world.
Activities for Reading and Learning How to Retell a Story
Below are the activities you can do with your child to support their oral development and using phrases to communicate their needs. Click on the title to reveal the activity content.
Use the strategies in the handout below to support your child in building skills to retell a story.
These handouts guide you through questions to use before, during, and after reading to your child to build their comprehension. Some questions may be too advanced for your child, but they will grow into them. It’s all about discussing the book with your child! If they have trouble answering one of your questions, model the answer for them to guide them to a new understanding!
We have provided you with multiple graphic organizers (or story maps). These are excellent tools that allow your child to think about what happened in a story. If your child is not writing, they can draw (and remember – drawing is a precursor to writing!) and parents can add in dictation. Some of the maps are basic, some more advanced. Some are geared towards fiction, and some towards nonfiction.
Fictionbooks are made-up by the author and are NOT TRUE.
Nonfictionbooks are about REAL people, places, events, and animals.
Additionally, you could encourage your child to retell the story by acting it out, using props, etc.
Beginning to Learn Some Words and Phrases
As children gain letter-sound knowledge, they can begin to recognize words. There are two primary ways that we learn to read words:
learn the links between letters and sounds so they can decode an unfamiliar written word by 'sounding it out' – a phonics approach
memorize what some words look like that cannot be “sounded out” so they can recognize it on sight. These words will often be short, high-frequency words that they see in most books they look at or read.
REMEMBER, at this age, we only teach word reading if the child is ready. If your child is not ready, that is OK. They will blossom soon.
Can your child recognize a few short words (like: I, me, and and a few others)?
Can your child recognize patterned words and phrases in well-known books?
Can your child read some words and phrases in their environment?
Activities for Learning Some Words and Phrases
Below are the activities you can do with your child to support their reading and learning some words and phrases. Click on the title to reveal the activity content.
High-frequency words are often called “sight words” because children are often expected to recognize them “by sight” or memory without sounding them out. For example in the word was, the "w" is decodable, but the "as" must be memorized because it has an irregular pronunciation as /uz/.
REMEMBER, at this age, we only teach words when they are ready. If your child is not ready, that is OK. They will blossom soon.
Repetitive pattern books are excellent for helping children begin to read. These books have repetitive text that occurs on each page. After reading this book with your child several times, they will be able to jump in and “read” when it is time to repeat those familiar words. Brown Bear, Brown Bear, is a classic example of a repetitive storybook.
Summary
Our children’s overall literacy development and readiness for school begin at home. Now is the time to start building the critical skills needed for life-long reading success. Helping them understand how print works, reading aloud to your child daily, and helping them learn to recall information and make connections will support their literary success throughout school and even into adulthood. The background knowledge children gain from reading, and being read to, is critically important. This will be important for reading comprehension in the years ahead.
Remember to use the activities in this module over and over to help your child practice, practice, practice!
