EARLY LITERACY IN THE HOMES

Early Literacy in the Homes

Early Literacy in the Homes

Introduction

Early literacy is comprised of five major components; speaking, listening, reading, writing, and schema. The speaking component is everything from a person talking to a child to the child talking with others. For example every time you talk to your child you are helping to build their oral language base. When children talk to other people, from peers to adults they are not only building their oral language base, but they are also building their communication skills. Another component of early literacy is listening, which is all of the sounds verbally and non-verbally that a child experiences. One of the most important listening strategies to teach a child is how to listen to some one reading a book. We can develop listening skills by just taking the time to read to a child.

Next we have our reading component which is ever so important with the tests that our children are facing year after year. Reading in this form is the stepping stones, not necessarily the achievement of our children to instantly read. We want our children to understand how books work, front, back, left to right. Children need to develop their own understanding of the mystery of this thing called reading. We need to be their guide on this great adventure by modeling good examples, showing them a variety of text, and letting them enjoy books with others. Our fourth component is writing, the use of a visual form of communication.

Writing I feel is never mastered, but we do want to develop our skills so we may communicate effectively. The beginning forms of a child's writing are often not recognized by the adult eye but in the mind of the child they are communicating words effectively. To help our children learn the stepping stones of writing we need to show them examples by modeling and pointing out writing to them. A few moments of showing our children the grocery list or even following the text with our fingers will help them see where writing comes from. Time must be set aside for children to explore writing, give them some paper and a pencil and let them explore.

Throughout a child's exploration of speaking, listening, reading, and writing, we need to continually ask them questions on what they think and why they are doing something, we need to communicate with our children. It is ever more important that we start literacy development at a young age the key to literacy development begins at home. An enormous amount of scholarly research supports the view that a child's early encounters with print at home have a tremendous effect on his or her later development at school. Should we hope that our children will naturally pick up reading or should we as parents, take steps toward developing our child's success in reading? This seems rather obvious, but the question is often where we ...