Book, print and letter knowledge - important for literacy development

Book and Print knowledge

• Research has shown that children whose parents read to them from a young age learn to read and write earlier and more easily.
• Start as early as possible, babies enjoy books too (some are quite tasty!)
• When reading a
  book, talk about the pictures, and encourage your child to use the pictures to help tell the story.
• Talk about the writing, run your finger along under the words as you read them
• Show the child a sentence
• Talk about sentences for example they are made up of words, they start with a capital letter and end with a full stop.
• Show your child a word -count the words in the sentence,
• Talk about the words eg long words, short words, find the longest word on the page
• Words are made up of letters
• Show them a single letter
• Point out the letters and talk about the sounds that they make.
  Something really important to remember is that
  Sounds and letters are NOT the same
  Sounds are what we hear
  Letters are a visual way of representing sounds
  A letter is written down and can be seen
  A sound is made in the mouth and can be heard
• You can point out print at any time
  Print is everywhere
  Road signs, on the packet of just about anything you buy, on the telly, the instruction book for the new video, clothes, watches, menus, the dogs collar, the base of the rubber duck in the bath tub..
• Point out environmental print- make a game of finding the letters from the child’s name in different places
• On long trips get the kids to all pick a letter and see who ‘s letter appears on car license plates the most.

Your child can demonstrate print and book knowledge by

-tracing words in books as he/she pretends to read

-trying to write words

-knowing how to hold a book, turn the pages

-learning the differences between words and pictures

-knowing that language can be relayed by writing.

Letter knowledge includes

• Name of the letter (sing the alphabet song)
• Sound it makes (some variation eg c can make a ‘k’ sound and a ‘s’ sound
• What it looks like (capital, lower case, different print types)
• How to write it—start and finish in the correct place.
• Some sounds are represented by two letters such as sh, ch, th and ng