Holiday Hints: Literacy

We created our Holiday Hints to highlight developmentally beneficial tools for young children.

The principles that we apply when offering literacy tools to young children are hugely important.

You want to be organized and clear as you approach literacy.

Most parents are unprepared - and that is understandable.

Please be aware that many products on the market will actually create difficulties for your child - including many letter puzzles, workbooks, early readers, and more - because they are not clear or developmentally appropriate. These products make the progression into literacy more challenging.

We want to offer you some better choices.

Talk with your child’s teacher to learn more about how you can help at home with literacy.

We hope that they will have specific insight that will benefit your child.

We will also share more about literacy in January. What you see below is just the start.

And if you are still seeking clarity about literacy and would like some additional support, consider a consult.

Sound-Symbol Correspondence

The most significant advice I can offer in starting your child on the path to literacy is to STOP using upper-case alphabetical letter names, and move to lower-case sound-symbol correspondence.

This is because the majority of what we read is comprised of lowercase letters. For some reason, we have capitalized every letter for young children. Capital letters are ubiquitous in early literacy products, and it isn’t helpful. This means your child will need to learn and retain twice as many symbols to read successfully. Why wouldn’t you offer lowercase letters, first and foremost?

These tools above will help you do so. They include visual associations - like the zebra image with ‘z' - which are often helpful for young children.

Offer your child just a few letters at a time to encourage retention.

If you have upper-case letter puzzles, magnets, etc at home - I suggest you take them out of your child’s space.

Writing

Writing is a progression that depends on secure sound-symbol correspondence.

Writing is not copying. It is an expression of thought and a creative act.

When your child has sound-symbol correspondence in place, you can start exploring writing. Start with lots of practice with larger letters and words on a large surface (chalkboard or art paper) with a larger tool (chalk or wax crayons). Move to smaller letters and words on paper with more refined tools (a pencil) as your child builds skills. From here your child can invite your child to label drawings, write short notes on memo paper or postcards, or use stationary sets.

My favorite writing pencils are here - they have no erasers by choice. You can also have a special set of illustration pencils available to encourage writing and illustrating in combination.

Reading

After you have offered your child lower-case sound-symbol correspondence and practice with phonetic writing, you are able to transition to lower-case phonetic words, short phonetic books, and eventually to non-phonetic reading.

Reading is a highly individual process.

It is very important to practice with reading individual words, not books.

It is key that you seek out good phonetically-based choices.

Don’t just pick up an ‘I Can Read’ or ‘Level K /1’ reader and expect success.

We’ve included reliable phonetically-based options for beginning readers. Familiar storybooks that feature lots of wonderful lowercase words are a great option, too, like the favorites you see here.

If you find yourself scaffolding your child’s reading overly much, you have moved too quickly through this progression. Slow down, and return to individual words for practice with decoding, like these. We also like these for memorization of sight words.