Early literacy skills can be broken down into two main categories: Meaning-related skills and code-related skills. 

Meaning Related Skills

• Vocabulary – The more words a child knows, the easier it is for them to learn new words and to gain meaning from the stories they hear and will eventually read on their own. Books help to expose children to the higher-level words they’ll encounter when they start school.
• Conversation – As children engage in conversation, they draw on their knowledge and experience to make new connections, form new knowledge and build language skills. This lays a strong foundation for understanding the stories they will hear and read on their own.
• Story comprehension – Understanding not only what is happening in a book, but why it’s happening, and why characters act and feel they way they do. Story comprehension means being able to read “between the lines” to figure out messages that aren’t explicitly stated, and understanding the larger meaning of the book.

Decoding Skills

• Print knowledge – The ability to identify letters, words and symbols on a page and to understand how print works – for example, understanding that print is read from left to right and that letters combine to make words.
• Sound awareness – Understanding that words can be broken down into syllables and smaller sounds, and that letters correspond to certain sounds.

Children learn early literacy skills best during back-and-forth conversations that build on their interests. When you pause during book reading to talk parts of a book that interest the child, it helps them understand the story and connect the new ideas in the story to their own life experiences. Children can also learn about literacy when you talk about print and how words sound. This can happen during any everyday activity, from book reading to grocery shopping, to outdoor walks, to looking at a computer together.

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Build Children’s Critical Thinking Skills

To fully understand the stories they hear, children need to use critical thinking skills. These are skills like problem-solving, predicting, explaining and evaluating, and they are what allow children to “read between the lines” to figure things out that aren’t explicitly stated in the book. Encouraging this kind of thinking early on prepares children for understanding the books they’ll read on their own later. Here are some tips for promoting the “E’s and P’s” of critical thinking: Explain, Evaluate, Predict, Project and Problem-solve:

Explain

Talk to children about why things happen and encourage them to draw on their existing knowledge and reasoning skills to come up with explanations, as well as the reasons for their conclusions.

Evaluate

Encourage children to offer opinions about their own preferences and the relative merits of different objects, events and experiences.

Predict

Make comments and ask questions that encourage children to make plausible predictions about what will happen next.

Project

Encourage children to project or put themselves into other’s minds with questions like, “How do you think he feels?”, “What do you think she’s thinking right now?” or “Why do you think he wants to do that?”

Problem-solve

Take advantage of daily opportunities to encourage children to solve problems. Help the children to describe the problem and draw on their knowledge and experiences as they think of alternative solutions and decide on the best option. 

Coming soon!