Enhancing Early Literacy
Welcome to Childcan’s Early Literacy Program
Our goal is to reach out to Childcan families with children up to the age of five to share our love of reading and all the wonderful benefits reading can offer. A child learns so much by listening to stories as they cuddle with a family member. Through our partnership with the Dolly Parton Imagination Library, we offer a free book each month, mailed to the child’s home, up to the month of the child’s fifth birthday. We are also developing a library of storybooks which will be available to borrow and will come with a guideline for parents that helps children develop reading skills and sound awareness. Below are suggestions you can use whenever you read with your child.
Tips For Parents to Make Reading Fun for Your Child
Cozy up!
Make up different voices for different characters.
Put emotion in your voice. If the story is exciting, sound excited!
Get into the rhythm of rhyming stories by clapping/rocking to the beat of the phrases as you rhyme. Encourage your child to clap along and also to turn the page as you’re reading.
Developing Basic Book Sense - Ask Your Child
Where’s the front/back of the book? Where is the title? Where is the author’s name?
How do we turn the pages?
How many words are on the page? (for very simple books)
How many toys/animals, etc. do you see on this page?
What do you think will happen next?
Who was your favourite character? Why?
What was your favourite part of the book? Why?
Parent Guidelines for Childcan’s Lending Library Books
The guideline which will be enclosed with our books will follow a before reading, during reading and after reading format. Similar suggestions can be used with other books which you share with your child.
Before reading, think about ways this book connects with you and your child.
During reading, focus on practising just one or two of the many literacy skills each time you read. The various skills can be enhanced over the multiple times you reread the story. Since rereading a book is good practice, take one or two of the following literacy skills to practise with each reading: book awareness, word awareness, phonological (sound) awareness, developing knowledge on various topics, following the story line, relating to the story, and math skills such as counting, identifying shapes, or telling time.
After reading, try some of the suggestions below to allow you and your child to enrich and strengthen what they learned.
Use the ideas any time you read with your child. Choose books from your personal library or the public library. Children love selecting their own books!
Phonological (Sound) Awareness Skills
The ability to hear rhymes (ring/king) and alliteration (funny frog).
Hearing words in spoken language.
Hearing syllables in spoken words and then being able to clap them out (glad - ly).
Hearing sounds at the beginning of words and then being able to produce words that begin with certain sounds (big - b - boy, boat, bunny, etc.).
Recognizing and identifying rhyming words and then being able to produce rhyming words (fit/bit - sit, kit, pit).
Being able to hear individual sounds together to make a word (e.g., c_a_t = cat).
Being able to segment sounds in words (e.g., cat = c_a_t).
Deleting, substituting and manipulating sounds in words (e.g., pig - remove the p and replace with d to get dig; remove the i in dig and replace with o to get dog).
Activities to Develop Phonological (Sound) Awareness
Look at books together at an early age.
Talk about how sounds are made with your mouth and practise making different sounds in front of the mirror (e.g., a snake makes a ‘ssssss’ sound).
Look at alphabet books and sing alphabet songs.
Sing nursery rhymes and songs, emphasizing the rhyme.
Read books together that emphasize sound play (e.g., rhyme, alliteration). Point out that the rhyming words sound the same because they have the same endings (e.g., “cat” and “hat”).
Play “I Spy” and take turns finding objects that begin with a specific sound.
Model and encourage your child to identify the number of syllables in a word by clapping or stamping their feet (e.g., butterfly: but-ter-fly). Clap out the name of your child as well as names of family members, friends, and pets.
Make up silly sentences that begin with the same sound (e.g., Katy the cute koala likes cuddling Chloe).
Swap sounds by taking turns to change a sound in a word to create a new word (e.g., hat - hut - hum - hug - bug - bag).
Put objects in a bag and the adult and child can take turns to pull out the objects to focus on:
-Rhyme: Put pairs of items in a bag. If the two objects they pull out rhyme, they keep the pair.
-Syllables: Place a variety of objects (e.g., toys, plastic food) into the bag. Have the child remove an object, say the word and clap how many syllables it has.
-Sound Segments: Place pairs of objects/pictures that have the same number of sounds in their name into the bag. Take out two items and see if they have the same number of sounds (e.g., b-oa-t and c-a-t have three sounds).
Websites for Parents
www.1000booksbeforekindgergarten.org
https://stories.audible.com/start-listen
http://growingbookbybook.com
http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/literacynumeracy/parentguideliten.pdf
(Document: Reading and Writing with Your Child Kindergarten to Grade 6, A Parent Guide)
Websites for Children
https://www.youtube.com/user/childcan: look for the StoryTime videos