What can we do at home?
Read aloud to your children. Hold them on your lap...or have them hold you on their laps!
Have your children read aloud to you. They can retell familiar books or memorized favorites or create stories for picture books or their own pictures.
Read all sorts of material aloud: billboards, signs, flyers, brochures, letters, commercials, ads, magazines, newspapers, comics.
Read material to your children that is not necessarily kids' stuff. If the children never hear big words like "gargantuan" and "nutrition," they'll have trouble figuring them out later in their own reading.
Create a special snuggle place or have a special snuggle chair for reading.
Create fun places for reading aloud. For example, during the summer, bring last year's leaky plastic wading pool inside, fill it with lots of pillows and stuffed animals, and snuggle up to read aloud.
Find out what your children's favorite books are and read them, but keep introducing new characters, new authors, new genres (mystery, animal, science fiction, etc.).
When you're reading aloud, use that context to help children learn letters and letter-sound relationships.
Encourage your children to respond to literature by dancing, dramatizing, drawing, or discussing. Together, make finger puppets or a shadow box or a diorama. Act out a story in the sandbox or in the tub.
Encourage your child to write daily. There are lots of wonderful pads of paper and bound blank books to choose from. Children can add their own illustrations, photographs, or pictures cut from magazines and newspapers. You can have your children dictate to you and you can ask for their help with writing an occasional letter (begin with the initial letters in their names).
Set up a message center where each day you write a short message to your children. It can be a question that your children will find the answer to during the day. It can be telling them what's for breakfast, or who's coming to visit, or where you're going in the car that day.
Secretly place coupons under their pillows or in their pockets for hugs, kisses, a glass of chocolate milk, or a story.
Have your children design a bookmark or a bookplate. Let them design door hangers to announce that there is a readaloud in progress or an author at work.
Write a story together in which you and your children take turns writing words and pictures to make a rebus story, where pictures are substituted for a word or sound. You could use a picture from a magazine, a family photograph, or a child's drawing as the starter for your story.
Cut up large words and letters from magazines and newspapers and help your children paste them together to create words, phrases, or messages.
For dessert, have your children write messages in pudding.
Create texture words: glue rice on paper to form words, sew letters on material, cut out sandpaper, glue foam peanuts on paper to form letters or words.
Share the writing of your grocery or shopping list with your children. They can embellish with illustrations. When you arrive at the store, have your children help you look for the words or the products on the shelves. You might go to the soup section of the store and have your children find all the words that say "soup."
Label lots of things in the house. Make cards with the label words on them and have your children match cards with labels.
Link your children's lives with the contents of books. Before or after a special family event (trip, wedding, birthday), go to the local library and find books that have pictures and information about similar events.
Draw a map of your neighborhood or buy a city map so that your children can see your street name and names of other familiar streets.
Decorate a t-shirt to celebrate a book. Use markers or fabric paints on a real shirt, or cut out the shape of a t-shirt from paper. Hang lots of paper t-shirts that have book celebrations on them from a string across your children's bedrooms or down the hallway.
Instead of using the t-shirt shape, make squares with pictures of scenes or characters from favorite books and make a large book quilt out of paper or material.
Have your children help you make a television list of programs the family will watch for the day or for the week.
Cover a box with brightly colored wrapping paper and fill it with leftover, unmatched writing paper and envelopes. Toss in a few unusual pens or pencils that have odd shapes or tops or colors, and add some stickers or small pictures that can be glued on the paper. Keep the box as a special writing center.
This list of suggested activities is short, and is designed only as a springboard for your own ideas. Begin with an activity you can do easily and comfortably with your children. Then add those activities that work especially well for you and your children.
Return to the May 1997 issue of Topics in Early Childhood Education
