What is Literacy?
“Literacy” is a word you may have heard tossed around at a library or at your child’s school, but it means more than just reading and writing; yes, it does include the mechanics of reading and writing, but also how a book or piece of printed material is used, recognizing what kinds of things are print (as opposed to numbers or art), understanding why it is important to recognize and being able to comprehend what was read and talk about it (Montoya, 2018).
The first thing to know is that literacy is a fluid concept. It is not a simple check box of having achieved one goal and then one is suddenly literate, or not for having not achieved the same goal. Literacy moves like water through a river, gathering speed in places and slowing in others, rushing in great bursts of enthusiasm, trickling through in starts and stops or moving at a slow steady pace, gaining levels of difficulty as it runs through the rapids. It has the flexibility to take on many forms throughout a person’s life, and to grow with different goals. A person can always become more literate as it is not a fixed state.
Because Literacy is fluid it grows over time and has the flexibility to meet different goals, once a child can read at a first-grade level, we don’t stop and say that the child is now literate; the child keeps learning, growing their reading comprehension skills and vocabulary, their ability to write and communicate, so that they can be part of and contribute to their community and society.
If the goal of literacy is to be able to read and write, understand what other people have written and be able to explain it to others and create writing themselves, then is there a way to help kids start that process early? Yes! It is called “early literacy skills.”
What is an Early Literacy Skill?
Early literacy skills are the skills that children learn prior to kindergarten that help them develop literacy when they get to the point of being able to read and write. The six early literacy skills are recognizing printed letters and knowing how to handle a book (print awareness), recognize the sounds that make up words (phonological awareness), being interested in and enjoying books (print motivation), knowing the names of letters and that they can look different but mean the same thing (letter knowledge), knowing the names of things (vocabulary) and describing things and events in the correct order (narrative skills).
Early literacy skills are not limited to a classroom or a library, they can be developed any where and at any time, and include more than just reading a book. These are skills that can be practiced in the car or the store by pointing out the print in signs in the world around you.
Ask your child questions about the things they see around them, answer questions about what that word means, tell stories to your child and let them tell you stories too. All of these seemingly unimportant things, are actually crucial in building your child’s ability to read, write and experience success school and curiosity about the world.
Why does this matter?
These are skills required for your child to succeed in both school and in life. They develop your child’s understanding of the printed word and its meaning, which will in turn create better developed reading comprehension. It is developing and maintaining a curiosity about the world and a desire to learn more.
They are the building blocks to storytelling skills, important not only for education development but safety as well. Early literacy skills help develop your child’s ability to hear the small sounds of a word and see how that word is formed in the mouth to be able to speak it. Like the frame of a house these skills provide your child with the structure needed around which to hang a school experience, homework, a book and even real-world events.
Six Types of Early Literacy Skills for School Success
There are six kinds of early literacy skills your child will work on prior to starting school to have the most success and positive experiences: print motivation, print awareness, letter knowledge, phonological awareness, narrative skills, and vocabulary. Each of these skills works both together and separately to build a foundation of knowledge and understanding for your child about the world around them and how to succeed in that world. Sometimes these skills are separated into even more specific categories, but generally, the following will cover most of the different skill areas. Let’s look at each one in a little more detail.
Print Motivation
Print motivation starts young and continues for the rest of your life. It just means that you are interested in things with print on them and enjoy books. It’s important to make the experience and interaction with books fun because learning to read is hard.
Besides making it fun, research has shown that one of the keys to building print motivation is showing your child that reading is important. After all, why bother learning to do something that doesn’t matter? Your child looks to you to determine what is important in their life. If you can show that you value reading, either by letting your child see you reading or by reading together, you place importance in the skill.
Researchers have demonstrated the importance of reading aloud. When you read aloud to your child and talk to them about the meaning of what you read, you are encouraging them to practice reading comprehension, something they will do automatically when they read on their own later (McGee & Richgels, 2003). The more you and your child can talk about books and subjects that interest them, the more interested they will be in reading.
Try these things to encourage print motivation with your child:
- Let your child choose books that look interesting to them
- Take breaks or stop if it is not fun, it is important to keep the enjoyment going rather than worrying about length
- Ask your child what they know about a subject or choose something they might be interested in to encourage curiosity
Print Awareness
Having ‘print awareness’ means that your child recognizes that those squiggles on the page have meaning. That’s it! Children generally develop print awareness at preschool age, but this is an easy one to start encouraging. All it really requires is that you point to the text of things when you say it.
Trace your finger under the line of text in the story book, for even more benefit place emphasis in the way that the text is written; is one word suddenly large? Say it with emphasis! Did one word get stretched across the page, like you often see for “Yaaawwwwwnnn”? Then get in there and say it the way it was written while tracing the word with your finger. This helps your child understand that not only do those squiggles on the page have meaning, the way they are written effect the meaning as well!
Another part of print awareness is understanding how books actually work. In the English language we hold the books so the spine is on the left and text is read from the top of the page down, reading left to right. If your home language is different, have your child practice in that way.
Print awareness is understanding how your home language is read. You can start teaching this at a very early age by letting your baby play with books, and continue holding books as they get older. A tablet is great, but nothing will beat learning from an actual, physical book. Try these tips to help build print awareness at home:
- Let your child play with books to get the feel for them
- Allow your child to turn the pages when you read together
- Point to words as you say them
- Look at print in your environment, such as grocery store labels or street signs
Letter Knowledge
If you have letter knowledge that means you can identify letters amongst other shapes, know what they are, know that they can take on different shapes or sizes and still mean the same thing. A kid who has letter knowledge can identify a letter and it’s sound, and eventually build this into an understanding of the whole alphabet.
An easy way to start building letter knowledge is simply by pointing out letters and saying what they are, it doesn’t need to be more complicated than that. Many children learn the letters of their name first as this holds significance to them, so that can be a great place to start. If their whole name seems too intimidating, a first and last initial are a great way to get started! Here are some ways to build this skill at home:
- Try “I Spy” books that feature letters as well as shapes
- Talk about the different shapes of letters on signs or books
- Read “ABC” books
- Practice letters in your child’s name
- Underline words with your finger as you read them
- Use emphasis when reading words that are printed in different sizes or fonts
Phonological Awareness
Did you know that all those crazy animal sounds people make at babies actually have a purpose? This is what it’s for! Phonological awareness is the understanding of the small sounds that make up words. Animal sounds and other ‘nonsense’ sounds are a way to introduce the sound of a word, and the natural emphasis you see adults put on words when they speak to babies is an instinctual understanding that a baby is watching your mouth move and will eventually mimic that movement to make the sound. If a child can hear the parts of a spoken word, it will be easier to “sound out” the word when reading it. Try out some of these tips to practice phonological awareness with your child:
- Sing songs- songs break down and stretch out the syllables of words to make them easier to hear
- Rhymes- rhymes repeat word sounds
- Clearly enunciate word sounds, such as ‘bat’ and ‘bag’
Narrative Skills
Narrative skills, like the word ‘narrate’ suggests, is the ability to tell a story. Stories are sequential. They have a beginning, middle and end. Being able to tell a story in order not only requires creativity, it also requires the mathematical skill of sequencing! How cool is that?
A grasp of narrative skills also helps children to read. It teaches them that there is an arc to a story, that something comes next that we are waiting for. It also means being able to describe things, recount events in order and tell stories. Has your child ever memorized the order of a favorite book rendering it impossible to skip any pages? Then your child is learning narrative skills!
Narrative skills might seem like a challenge to teach, after all, what if you are not a storyteller? Don’t worry! It doesn’t have to be that complicated. Simply narrate what you are doing for your child. Are you cooking dinner? Just explain your process in simple terms. “First, I take out the pot, then I fill it with water. Now the water is hot so I put in the pasta.”
Or you can narrate getting your child dressed in the morning, “First we take off our pajamas, next we put on our shirt, then we put our pajamas in the drawer.” Anything you do can be broken down into short narrative steps that help teach your child an order of events.
Developing narrative skills goes beyond an early grasp of literature. Did your child have a great day at the park, or a bad day at school? Did something exciting, important, or serious happen? Helping your child grasp the concept of narrative skills early on will help them relay events in their lives in accurate and consecutive order, earlier on. Try some of these skills at home:
- Read picture books without words to make up your own stories together, read the How-To here
- Talk about the events of a day
- Use words like ‘first,’ ‘next,’ and ‘last’
- Ask open-ended questions
Read more about why narrative skills are important for social skills, language development and safety in this post.
Vocabulary
Learning to read is much easier if all you have to do is learn the mechanics of reading because you already know what the word means. Children who have a bigger vocabulary have an easier time learning to read because it will make more sense. Start as soon as you can, even if your child is still an infant or a young toddler. Research shows that children had a stronger vocabulary by age three if they were read to as an infant or young toddler (Jimenez, M, et al. 2019).
A study of kindergarten aged children showed that five year olds who were read five books or more a day had heard 1.4 million more words than children whose caregivers did not read to them. Even reading one book a day makes a huge difference in word exposure. The same study found that kids who were read just one book a day had heard 290,000 words by the time they were five years old.
They further calculated that a child whose caregivers claimed to never read to them, would have only heard 4,662 words by five years old (Ohio State University, 2019). That is a massive gap when you are learning to read. But if that’s not where you are at right now, don’t despair! You can start today!
All it takes is a few minutes a day before bed to read a story or two. Talk out loud to your child more often, using real words. Ask if your child knows the meaning of the word and explain it in a way they will understand with examples that are relevant to them. Try these tips to help improve your child’s vocabulary at any age:
- Read a mix of fiction and nonfiction books to be exposed to more kinds of words
- Read books aloud with your child
- Respond positively when a child asks what a word means, fear or shame will decrease their likelihood to ask word meanings
- Use conversation rather than commands with children to encourage conversation
- If bilingual, practice words in home language first to make learning another language later easier
- Explain the meanings of new words, use it in a sentence or with an example
- Label things you see together
- Narrate actions, especially during play time
If all of these seem overwhelming, choose one to focus on for a week and see how easy it is to add into your every day routine. Then next week review the list again and choose another one to try out. Before you know it you will naturally be adding these things into your daily routines!
*This is, of course, a general guide and is not meant to diagnose. If you have concerns about your child’s behavior or development please be sure to speak with a medical professional, your child’s physician or teacher.
References
Montoya, S. (2018, October). Defining literacy. In GAML Fifth Meeting (pp. 17-18). Retrieved 3/10/21 from: http://gaml.uis.unesco.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/12/4.6.1_07_4.6-defining-literacy.pdf
Venezky, R.L., Wagner, D.A., & Ciliberti, B.S. (Eds.), (1990). Toward Defining Literacy. Delaware: International Reading Association. https://repository.upenn.edu/literacyorg_chapters/10/
McGee, L., & Richgels, D. (2003). Designing early literacy programs: Strategies for at-risk preschoolers and kindergarten children. ERIC Document ED 478237. https://www.academia.edu/30748176/Designing_Early_Literacy_Programs_Strategies_for_At_Risk_Preschool_and_Kindergarten_Children
Gambrell, L and Marinak, B. (2009). “Reading Motivation: What the Research Says.” Reading Rockets. Retrieved on 3/10/2021 from: https://www.readingrockets.org/article/reading-motivation-what-research-says
“Shared Reading at Age 1 Year and Later Vocabulary: A Gene–Environment Study”. Manuel E. Jimenez, Nancy E. Reichman, Colter Mitchell, Lisa Schneper, Sara McLanahan, Daniel A. Notterman. The Journal of Pediatrics doi:10.1016/j.jpeds.2019.07.008.
Ohio State University. (2019, April 4). A ‘million word gap’ for children who aren’t read to at home: That’s how many fewer words some may hear by kindergarten. ScienceDaily. Retrieved March 11, 2021 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/04/190404074947.htm