5 Essential Literacy Activities for Beginning Readers

As your little ones enter the world of beginning to read, there are five essential literacy activities that you should incorporate into your daily lessons.  These include:

Reading to your child.  Read books to your child that offer rich oral language and involve opportunities for discussion.  For example, you might want to read the book No David! as you ask your child to infer why the mom (or dad) might be mad at David. Build your child's vocabulary with books in the Skippyjon Jones series.  You might want to see if your kiddo can use the context clues to figure out what the Spanish words mean.  Older kiddos don't have to be left out of the reading aloud experience.  A Series of Unfortunate Events is also a great vocabulary builder for your older ones.

Read with your child.  Read with your child using the support of familiar, predictable, and rhyming texts such as Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See?  Have your child fingerpoint as they read.  You can type up segments of the text or a sentence for the child to arrange in the correct order.

Write with your child.  Take turns writing a story or a few sentences with your child about your day's activities.  Model how you think of beginning sounds as you write.  For example if you were writing "We went to the park" you might say, I know that we starts with the 'w' sound and w makes that sound.

Word Study.  Word study for the beginning reader includes letter sorts and cards to teach the alphabet, picture sorts to teach beginning sounds, and concept sorts for thinking and vocabulary instruction. 

Here are a few examples:

ABC Sort
Rhyming Bingo Game
More Sorts (features several different types of sorts)

Talk With.  Talk to your child often to help their oral language grow.  Tell stories, talk about pictures in books, play what if, anything to make your kiddo use their words.