Activities to get your child ready to read
Play
Play is how children learn, and how they come to understand their world. Play can happen in many ways. Play games, play with words, and play with music and rhymes. Play make believe, invent new worlds, and create your own stories.
Bring a sense of adventure and fun to your reading by reading with humour, expression and enthusiasm. Place a few books with cutouts, lift-the-flaps, pop-ups or touch-and-feel elements with your baby’s toys so they begin to interact with books and start to see books as fun and exciting. Let them touch, feel and explore these books.
Reading in different places also adds to the excitement of reading. Try reading in different places around your house or city.
Playing Tips
- Print and books should be familiar and everyday items in your child's environment. Allow your child to explore books by keeping a variety of books within reach. Keep some books in your child's toy box. Start a little library for your child, keeping books on lower shelves.
- Help your child roll clay, play dough or plasticine into thin "logs." Ask your child to use the logs to form the letters they are learning.
- Choose a "Letter of the Day" and point out everything you see, all day long, that starts with that letter. Find and name letters in books, on signs and labels, on toys, food boxes and other objects all around.
- Play games with alphabet blocks, felt or foam letters, or letters cut from newspapers or magazines. Try making simple words or your child's name.
- Play with magnetic letters on the refrigerator or on metal baking trays. Arrange the letters in alphabetical order. Remove a letter and ask your child which one is missing. Can they put the letter back into the correct space? Or, arrange the letters incorrectly and ask your child to put them into the correct order.
- Bring a sense of adventure to your reading. Read with humour, expression and enthusiasm. Give the story characters different voices. Make your voice loud or soft, high or low. Read faster or slower to fit the story, and add pauses for dramatic effect. Play with adding sounds. Try using a puppet or stuffed animal to help read or tell a story. Involve the whole family in stories.