Children get ready to read long before they start attending school.  You can help your young child learn early literacy skills now.  This will make it easier for your child to learn to read once he or she starts school.

Six Skills to Get Ready to Read are:

1) Print motivation – children’s interest & enjoyment of books

• Make reading fun and stop reading once they are no longer interested

2) Phonological Awareness – the ability to hear and play with the smaller sounds in words

• Say nursery rhymes together and sing songs

3) Vocabulary – knowing the names of things

• Talk and read with them, explain unfamiliar words

4) Print awareness – noticing print everywhere, knowing how to handle a book and how to follow the words on a page

• Point to signs and other words around you and read what they say,
• Let your child turn the pages as you read a book, point to words from   time to time as you read so your child learns you are reading the text and not the pictures

5) Letter Knowledge – knowing that letters are different from each other and they have different names and sounds

• Read alphabets books and sing alphabet song to introduce children to letters
• Talk about the letters that are most interesting to your child

6) Narrative Skills – ability to describe things and events and tell stories

• Ask your child to tell you about something that happened to him
• Choose a book you’ve read a number of times.  Read it again and at    certain points in the story, let your child tell you what happens next.

This information was compiled from Early Literacy Storytime @ Your Library: Partnering with Caregivers for Success by Saroh Nadharni Ghoting and Pamela Martin-Diaz.