These are the most common stages your child will take on the road to literacy. Like navigating any roadmap, plan for stops, detours, scenic byways, and naps along the way. Pay close attention to the signs your child points out to you. They will help you decide when to keep going and when it’s time to pack it in for the day
Reading Ritual
A routine is when you repeat an activity regularly without putting much thought into it. A ritual is when you infuse a repeated activity with purpose and meaning. Developing a reading ritual is the first step to teaching your child other literacy skills.
Behind the Scenes
Though Helen left the classroom to pursue a creative career, her passion for teaching children remained. Using her passion for books and literacy as inspiration, Helen now creates literacy resources for young learners. Helen’s background in Fine Arts, creative writing, and early education all converged. LitSteps is the result.
Love Languages
It’s time to put your detective’s cap on, and do some investigating. Here’s a list of the five love languages and examples of ways to express them. Practice communicating in each of the languages while paying close attention to how your child reacts.
Inspiring Your Child
Look for inspirational moments or characters in the stories you read with together. Point out life-changing events in the movies you watch. Tell your child inspirational stories about characters or people you admire. You and your child are the main characters in your stories. Recall the big moments in your own lives.
Teaching Your Child
You have the leading role in the stories your child sees unfolding each day. Play to your audience. Notice what makes them laugh or cry. Pay attention to the things they dread and the things they run towards. Then give them more of the things that light them up.
Learning Colors
There’s a reason primary education puts a lot of focus on teaching colors. The world is a colorful place. Tap into your child’s sense of sight. Teach your child colors so they have words to describe their world to you.
Learning Shapes
As with colors, teaching shapes is one of the earlier units taught in the classroom. Children usually master basic shapes pretty quickly because they can relate them to many everyday items they use.
Learning Letters
We teach the alphabet because letters build words, which build sentences, which build stories, which build the world we live in. We learn to speak and read and write in order to communicate our ideas and unique perspectives.
Learning Numbers
Young learners often confuse numerals with letters. Teaching numeric concepts before teaching the numeric symbol helps. Teaching your child to count and identify numbers builds their number sense and gives them the background they’ll need to move on to more complex math skills like addition and subtraction.
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