Developing print awareness and preliteracy skills in young children is crucial for their reading success. By incorporating these strategies into daily routines, both educators and parents can foster a love for reading while building essential language skills. Here are ten tips to help children develop print awareness and improve their preliteracy abilities.
Print Awareness
If you use books to help students achieve their language goals, consider incorporating print awareness into your lessons. The following tips are for both educators and parents.
- Title Study:
Before you begin reading, mention the title (this works even for articulation books) and the author. Let children look at the capitalized printed words and try to guess what the book or story might be about.
- Find and Point:
After opening the book, ask the students where you should begin reading. Have them point out a letter, a word, or a space between words. You can also ask them to find specific high-frequency words like “a,” “the,” and “they,” or repeated words in the story. Moreover, they can identify rhyming words or find the repeated first letter/sound in alliterations.
- Use Your Finger to Track:
While reading, track the words with your finger. This reinforces the fact that we read from top to bottom and left to right (in English).
- Mental Representation:
Pair words with symbols, mnemonics, or graphic visualizations for additional emphasis.
- Embedded Print in Games:
Incorporate embedded print into gameplay. For example, matching games often have print labels, and grocery pretend play games can include shopping lists with labelled pictures.
Interactive Book Reading
Engaging preschoolers and improving their preliteracy skills is most effective through interactive book reading. This method uses a book as a communication tool rather than an adult-directed activity. Try these tips for interactive reading:
- Repeat!:
Repeat the reading process multiple times. Children enjoy reading the same stories repeatedly, which benefits them by promoting vocabulary growth and faster encoding of concept words and high-frequency words.
- Turn-Taking:
This works well with books that have rhyming or repeating phrases. Pause and let the child complete the next word. For example, in “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?” pause and let the child finish, “I see a red bird looking at __.”
- Read It Their Way:
Allow children some autonomy during story time. Some might prefer to hold the book and turn the pages, while others may want to start on a favorite page or skip pages. This is great as long as they interact with you and the book.
- Comment About Pictures:
Discuss the illustrations in children’s books. Talking about the visuals allows children to hear a variety of descriptive language. Try books with no or few words, like Alexandra Day’s Carl series, and consider books with characters different from your students.
- Focus on the Words, Too:
Help children focus on the text to develop print awareness. As their awareness grows, they start to understand the rules of print and notice patterns.
- Verbal Expansion:
Increase the number of words spoken. Building on a child’s utterances promotes language development. If they point at a picture and say “dog,” reply with “a black/big/happy dog.”
- Proceed into the Game:
Incorporate themes, vocabulary, and concepts from stories into play-based activities. For example, after reading “A Farm for Old MacDonald,” play with farm animals and make animal sounds.
- Make Remarks or Pose Questions:
Asking questions during reading helps improve linguistic skills. While older children can respond to questions involving prediction and inference, younger toddlers respond best to basic queries like who, what, and where. Modelling language, concepts, and grammatical structures can also be done through comments.
- Make a Big Deal Out of It:
Use gestures, funny voices, or emotional touches to make specific words stand out. For instance, in “Rosie’s Walk,” use your hands to illustrate the prepositions “AROUND the pond” and “OVER the haystack.”
- Reduce Your Pace:
Take your time as you read. This allows children more time to digest the story and have a conversational turn, both of which can improve comprehension.
By integrating these tips into your reading sessions and daily interactions, you can help children build a strong foundation for reading and language development. Encouraging print awareness and preliteracy skills not only prepares children for school but also instills a lifelong love of learning. For more ideas on enhancing your child’s language skills, check out our post on Fun and Educational Summer Speech-Language Activities for Kids.
These activities are aligned with our approach at the Talking Brains Center in Dubai, where we specialize in Speech and Language Therapy and Occupational Therapy to support children’s holistic development. Explore our therapy programs to see how we can help your child reach their full potential.
