Early Literacy

As a parent of three boys, I have personal knowledge and experience of how important early literacy is for a child, thus giving parents that personal knowledge that I have experienced is just a start. In so many ways children’s brains are growing at a phenomenal rate in which “The interactions that young children have with such literacy materials as books, paper, and crayons, and with the adults in their lives are the building blocks for language, reading and writing development.”(Early, 2003) When children are becoming literate, “Children who know more about a wide range of topics acquire new words more easily than children whose knowledge of the world is more limited.”(Gleason/Ratner, 2013. p. 330) in which case reading to a child can grow their knowledge and may make them want to learn more, for instance reading a Thomas the Train book may grow into a love of trains, in which case a child will want to watch trains, read about what type of trains there are all over the world, plus even want to go to a train museum and take a train ride. All this and more just from a short book about a train named Thomas.

Children learn to speak when spoken to face to face thus teaching them how to pronounce sounds and words, but just because a child is learning speech does not mean they are
Short stories with pictures can engage a child from infancy through toddler years a lot more than a book with just words that have no visual stimulation to catch their attention. Also, engage your child in helping turn the pages and tell you what they see in the pictures, or feel if there are sensory items in the book. Children love to explore and tell you what they see, touch and hear when a story is told to them, let them tell the story in their own words from the pictures they