Literacy Connections

ABCs on the driveway.

We (teachers/parents/caregivers) need to actively engage children in meaningful experiences that teach literacy skills in context while building upon prior learning. Children need to be read aloud to daily and given opportunities to talk about, retell, reread, and discuss stories. We need to make it a priority to increase the experiences children have with and how they interact with a variety of print. Children must have the opportunity to play games with language, to sing songs and to recite poems and rhymes to increase linguistic awareness. Children should also learn alphabetic and phonemic principals, the knowledge that letters represent words and sounds, and that words are made up of small parts of sounds, in developmentally appropriate ways, without the use of drill and practice on isolated skills. All these things work together to ensure optimal development that prepare children for both writing and reading.