Building Blocks to Literacy

How do books impact your life? Are you the type who can’t go to bed without reading a few pages of a novel, or are you a vacation reader- devouring books while relaxing somewhere warm? How do you get your news? For some people, the morning ritual of reading the newspaper has been replaced by reading the news on an app on our smartphones. No matter your preference, reading is a big part of our lives. Whether you enjoy novels, magazines, or blogs, the ability to read profoundly improves our lives and our knowledge base.

Children begin developing skills to read and write long before they are physically able to do so. Emergent literacy is a term that describes how children learn to interact with books and the process of reading and writing at an early age. This includes:

- Print motivation: showing interest in and enjoying books

- Vocabulary: knowing the names of objects, places, feelings

- Print awareness: noticing letters, knowing how to handle a book (e.g. the way we read up-to-down and left-to-right in English)

- Narrative skills: being able to describe past events or tell stories (lately at our clinic, the excited retelling of the movie “Frozen” has been a common occurrence!)

- Letter knowledge: the ability to label letters and the sounds they make, and recognizing letters in our everyday environment (signs, food labels, etc)

- Phonological awareness: being able to hear and manipulate the smaller sounds in words (“What is the first sound in ‘fish’?, What word is left in ‘baseball’ if you take away ‘base’?”)

As children increase their ability to recognize letters, scribble “words,” make silly rhymes, and point out street signs and logos, they begin to combine what they know about speaking and listening with what they know about print, which readies them for the next process: learning to read and write.

Unfortunately, not all children are primed to be successful in reading and writing. There are signs that may put children at risk for acquiring reading and writing skills. These include:

- preschool speech and language disorders

- physical or medical conditions (e.g. chronic ear infections, cerebral palsy)

- developmental disorders (e.g. autism)

- poverty

- home literacy environment

- family history of language or literacy difficulties

Some of these situations are unavoidable; however, speech-language pathologists play a crucial role in prevention of reading difficulties, identifying at-risk children, and providing intervention to remediate problems, especially for kids with medical issues, speech and language delays/disorders, or developmental disorders. Signs that may indicate future literacy issues include: decreased interest in nursery rhymes and reading books with parents/caregivers, difficulty understanding simple directions, difficulty learning/recalling letters, and difficulty recognizing letters in the child’s own name.

What can be done to help preschool-age children build the skills needed to develop strong reading and writing skills? If you have young children at home, there is so much you can do!

- Starting in infancy, read with your children every day. Tell your child how much you enjoy “story time” with him/her. Story time will become part of a cozy, loving routine that will form positive memories with books as they get older.

- Have fun when reading to children! Use silly voices for different characters, make funny expressions and noises, use humor and expression. Be a ham!

- Be interactive. Ask questions about the book (predicting what will happen next, guessing how the characters are feeling). Answer questions your child may have. Point things out on the page and engage your child. Show your child the print on the page as well, so they begin to learn how words in book work (e.g. how words are separated by spaces).

- Make children see how reading is an important part of your life. When you show an interest in books/magazines and demonstrate how much you enjoy reading, your child will pick up on that.

- Decrease “screen time” (time spent watching TV/movies, playing video games, or using computers, tablets, and smart phones). Instead, plan a time for the whole family to read, with children reading (or looking at pictures of) an age-appropriate book.

- Don’t be afraid to read the same book over and over. Your child often wants you to read his/her favorite story “again and again.” Research suggests that repeated readings help children develop language skills.

- Ask your child to help you make grocery lists, write thank you notes, and participate in other early writing activities.

- Point out the letters and words you see everywhere: on street signs, at movie theaters, on menus. Show your kids how reading and writing is a huge part of our lives.

On a final note, there are some children whose parents simply cannot give them the enriched home literacy environment described above. East Bay Children’s Book Project is an organization that helps build literacy by giving books to schools and programs to help children who have little or no access to them. They have given out over a million free books since 2005. If you’d like to help by donating your children’s old books, please click the link below.

http://www.eastbaychildrensbookproject.org/

Happy reading! Coming up in our next blog entry: social language.