Pre-reading skills build the foundation for your child’s earliest steps toward reading and writing. Letter-sound recognition (phonics), listening skills, vocabulary acquisition, phonological awareness, and decoding will naturally improve as your kid becomes more accustomed to language and communication.
However, you can strengthen their pre-reading skills in the following ways.
Reading Bedtime Stories
Reading to your children every night offers them an advantage in school and prepares them to develop important listening skills. According to studies, reading to your child in infancy can increase their vocabulary and reading skills for up to four years later. Brain imaging has indicated that children who adapt stories early in life build nurturing bonds, which improve early brain development.
Sing Songs and Rhymes
The ultimate pre-reading activity for preschoolers is singing nursery rhymes. It is an excellent opportunity to introduce them to new concepts and words. Because your child learns language from their environment, singing picturesque nursery rhymes opens a gateway into an entirely different universe. Singing Old Macdonald’s can be a great way to learn about farm animals.
Has your child retold a story?
Retelling stories encourages your child to narrate events in the correct order, which is an important skill for listening and speaking. Request that your child recounts a tale that they have heard. It could be a story about playtime, a recent family trip, or the story of a book or film that they enjoyed. Ask your children to recall who you met and what happened after a weekend outing. It improves your child’s memory, listening, and speaking skills.
Fun with Letters
The alphabet is essential for letter-sound recognition. Activities and innovative games are a great way to engage a child and help them learn the ABCs. You can play letter puzzles on the floor with your child or read alphabet books like Dr Seuss’ ABCs. You can also use play dough or clay to make ABCs with your child.
Play Word Games
A great pre-reading activity, word games allow the child to get used to letters, sounds and words. You can play the following games.
I Spy: Use linguistic cues like, “I spy something that starts with M” or “I spy something that rhymes with ‘cat’.” You can add clues for the child, such as “I spy something that begins with ‘C’ and has a tail” (a cat).
Word Families: Take turns picking a starter word—this can be the “child” in the family if you prefer—and then create as many rhyming words as possible. They can also be meaningless words. List terms or make up a family: “I am ‘bat,’ my mother is ‘cat,’ my father is ‘fat,’ my brother is ‘sat,’ my sister is ‘mat,’ my grandmother is ‘pat’ and so on.
Look at Environmental Print
Environmental print refers to symbols, signs, logos, and words that kids see daily but cannot read. Few children, for example, may recognise that the Golden Arches indicate the presence of a McDonald’s or that the red circle with a line in the middle on the street corner indicates a stop sign.
Allow your child to create their environmental print book. Provide magazines, newspapers, a stapled sheet of blank paper, safety scissors and glue and the child can cut out familiar logos and symbols, place one on each page of her book, and read it to you.
Conclusion
Before any child can learn to read and spell well, they must learn five pre-reading skills to create a solid foundation. Pre-reading skills are critical because they prepare children to decode words freely and read with comprehension. They must be developed before teaching kids how to read.