Literacy Activities for Toddlers and Young Children

Today is Family Literacy Day in Canada!   Family Literacy Day is a national initiative created by ABC Life Literacy Canada to raise awareness of the importance of engaging in reading and other literacy based activities as a family.  Numerous studies have demonstrated the children who are read to at home tend to perform better in school.  Reading together is fun too, and the sessions need not be long. Even just 15 minutes a day can improve a child’s literacy skills dramatically. Literacy activities do not need to be limited to reading books though.  Here are seven fun literacy related activities that you can try with your toddler or preschooler today:

1. Go on an Alphabet Hunt: Buy an inexpensive punch out bulletin board alphabet set, or cut your own alphabet letters out of paper.  Hide them around your playroom, and have your little ones search to find each letter.  When all of the letters have been collected, lay them out on the floor in alphabetical order.  With young children, I like to sing the alphabet song while we arrange the letters.  Older preschoolers can be challenged to arrange the alphabet without help.

2. Fishing for a Letter: Attach paper clips to foam letters (or just use the same cut outs you used for the first activity).  Arrange the letters on a blue blanket or towel (we used a blue playsilk).  Attach a magnet to a dowel with string to create a fishing pole.  Have your toddler use the magnetic fishing pole to "catch" a letter, and then identify it. Older kids can try to think of a word that starts with the sound the letter represents. As you can see in this picture, we caught a "P":

3. "I Spy - The Alphabet Edition: Instead to asking your child to guess what you spy that is red, try saying "I spy with my little eye, something that begins with the "buh" ("b") sound." Take turns being the person who spies, and the person who guesses.  This is a great game to play while you are waiting in a doctor's office or in line at the grocery store, and you can use it with your favourite picture books too.  Simply open the book to a page with an illustration that has a variety of different objects on it, and have your child guess what you spy on the page.

4. Musical ABC's: Write each letter of the alphabet on a sheet of construction paper.  Lay the letters out on the floor in a circle.  Turn on the music, and have little ones walk from letter to letter.  When the music stops, have each child try to identify the letter she is standing on, or the sound it represents. You may want to start with just a few letters, and introduce new letters gradually. 

5. Rhyme Chains: This was a favourite activity of A. and mine from the time he was two until he was six, and even though he is eight now we still enjoy playing it once and a while. Say a word, such as "hat", and have your child try and think of a work that rhymes with it. You then say another word that rhymes with "hat", and the play continues back and forth until someone gets stuck.  When he was younger, it was less important that his responses were "real words", and more important that he grasp the concept of a rhyme.  Not that he is older, we challenge each other with words that are much more difficult to rhyme.

6. Labels: Write words such as "chair", "desk", "cupboard" and "fridge" on pieces of paper, and attach them to those objects.  This gives kids a constant reminder that words are like pictures that represent objects, and provides visual cues of the sounds that the letters represent.

7. Letter Sort: Most toddlers and preschoolers love to sort objects. Capitalize on this by natural inclination by putting together a letter sort.  Choose two letters of the alphabet.  Write each letter out on several seperate small sheets of paper (you may, for example, have 10 pieces of paper with the letter "A" written on them, and 10 with the letter "B".  Mix the two types of letters together, and have your child sort them into a pile for each lettter.

Be sure to head over to momstown.ca to enter to win a great family literacy prize pack, and to find more family literacy activities too.

What are you reading with your family right now?