16 Early Literacy Skills & Ways To Develop Them
The ideal time to start fostering a child’s early literacy abilities through play is during their early years. To create a solid foundation for learning formal skills, children must develop a number of skills before learning to read.
From a very young age, you may start helping your kid in developing pre-reading abilities. In fact, you are encouraging communication and language when you respond to your infant by chattering back to her.
What is the meaning of early literacy?
Early literacy may be defined as a set of abilities and knowledge that work together to support your child’s reading development. Your youngster must be aware of their language and writing abilities. It entails comprehending the nature and goals of writing. The development of phonological awareness, print awareness, and listening comprehension are other components of early literacy.
Children gradually come to comprehend that reading is made up of phonemes (sounds) and graphemes (symbols) as they are exposed to books and language over time. Additionally, your youngster will get enthusiastic and interested in reading as well as be motivated to learn to read. It is essential to complete this stage or else teaching your kids to read will be pointless.
What are some essential early literacy skills?
In order to progress in school, your child has to learn a variety of skills, including visual literacy, auditory classification, and many more. The following is a brief description of some of the most essential skills that your child should begin to develop at a young age.
Graphic Memory
Graphic memory, or the capacity to recall what has been observed, is crucial for acquiring letter combinations, letter formations, and sight words.
Visual Classification
Visual classification is the capacity to distinguish between similarities and differences, particularly between letters like b and d or between words like dad and terrible.
Auditory Classification
Your child’s ability to distinguish between the variations and resemblances of sounds and words depends on auditory classification.
Narrating Stories
After you have read or told a story to your youngster, he should be able to tell you the narrative again. He might be able to summarise the basic idea or the story’s beginning, middle, and end, but perhaps not all the specifics and that’s alright as long as he is able to narrate it to a part.
Anticipating Sequences
Your kid must be capable of anticipating or predicting what will happen next in a story as well as order the events.
Cause and Effect
Understanding the reasons behind events and the actions that produced their results is known as cause and effect. It can start to develop quite early.
Graphic Reading
When a young child can read and comprehend a tale only by seeing the visuals, this is what is happening. Additionally, it entails providing straightforward visual responses to questions about the narrative. A youngster can learn to infer from images that contain information. For instance, the picture suggests it is daylight because the sun is shining although the words do not specify what moment of day it is.
Graphic Literacy
Graphic literacy is the capacity to comprehend and interpret information presented visually.
Matching
If they practice matching games, most kids get pretty adept at matching early on. It entails looking for images or ideas that are comparable to one another.
Focusing on Detail
Your youngster will benefit from this ability to concentrate on smaller, less visible elements.
Auditory Awareness
Hearing and understanding sounds are both parts of sound awareness. It includes hearing noises, recognising sounds, differentiating sounds, and more.
Rhyme Sense
When your youngster can identify words and sounds that rhyme, they are said to have rhyme awareness. They also practise saying rhymes.
Letter Knowledge
Letters should be introduced to your child at a young age. The most effective technique to teach letter construction practically is to play with actual letters.
Forming words on a workbook is a feature of formal writing and reading instruction; it is not required in the formative days before the development of fine motor skills.
Name Recognition
This is a fascinating skill since it allows a youngster to understand and recognise his own name just by looking at the letters on a sheet of paper!
Pattern Recognition
When your youngster can easily identify a pattern, that is pattern recognition. They are able to recognise shapes, their connections, and even the location of the pattern’s omission.
Phonological Sense
Your youngster has phonological awareness when they can identify particular sounds in words. It entails listening to sounds, disassembling sounds, and putting them back together again.
