Welcome back to storytime!
I'm spending some quality time with the 6 Every Child Ready to Read early literacy skills this week for a training project I'm working on, and thought I'd do a review post about them as we head into storytime season.
The six skills researchers have identified as essential for kids to have in place before they can be successful readers are:
Print Motivation: Loving books! Being interested in books and enjoying books.
Important Because: Kids who are more interested in books are more motivated to learn to read on their own.
Phonological Awareness: Hearing sounds! Being able to hear and play with the smaller sounds in words, like rhymes, syllables, beginning sounds.
Important Because: Kids have to be able to hear how words "come apart" before they can sound words out successfully.
Vocabulary: Knowing words! Knowing the names of things.
Important Because: The bigger a child's vocabulary, the easier it is to recognize words on the page and understand what is being read.
Narrative Skills: Telling stories! Being able to desribe things and events and tell stories.
Important Because: This is the comprehension piece. If you can describe what you're reading, you can understand it. If you can't understand it, you're not going to be very motivated to read.
Print Awareness: Seeing print! Seeing print everywhere, knowing how books work, how words work on a page.
Important Because: You can't start tackling learning to read print until you understand what it is.
Letter Knowledge: Knowing letters! Knowing that letters have different names, shapes, and sounds.
Important Because: You can't start to sound words out if you don't understand what words are made of.
If you do a storytime, tell us a little about how you provide your literacy tip to parents in your sessions. Do you do it at the beginning? Middle? End? Do you have a routine, or do you try different things each time?
Posts
