Early literacy skills don't only happen once your child is enrolled in and attends a school. They are first learned in the home, as young as three years old. At three, your child should have developed key skills that will one day enable her to become proficient in language and reading. A study by Carolyn Chaney, specialist in Language and Social Interaction for San Francisco State University, and published in the Journal of Applied Psycholinguistics, confirmed that early language skills are the best predictor of your child's success in literacy and metalinguistic awareness in the future.
Letter Recognition
At age three, your child has the capacity to recognize letters on sight. By age four, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, 43 percent of children are proficient in recognizing letters by their shape. Helping your child sing the alphabet song, writing out letters of the alphabet for her and talking about each one should help your three-year-old become more familiar with the alphabet.
Letter Sounds
Helping your three-year-old recognize letters and understand what sound each makes can prepare your child for reading. Give your child games to play to learn about the sounds in the alphabet, like saying a word and allowing him to guess what letter it starts with, or locating items around town that start with a certain letter. One day those skills will help him to read his first book.
Name Recognition
At three years old, your child should easily be able to recognize her own name. Although it may involve memorizing the order of letters more than reading or spelling, helping your child recognize her name spelled out gives her a rudimentary knowledge of certain letters and their sounds. Write her name on a piece of paper, or spell it out on a plaque for her door so that she becomes interested in the personalized use of her name, advises BabyCenter.com.
Letter Formation
Lightly draw outlines of letters to have your child trace over, or help him to spell his own name. Your three-year-old likely won't be able to write much more than his name, but this is a good start for future writing skills. Learning how to hold a pencil properly and form letters into a word, even if it doesn't make sense, sets your child on the right path to literacy.
Sight Words
A three-year-old thinks she is reading when she memorizes the words and the way they look in a familiar book and can point them out from memory. You may dismiss this as memorization, but your child is actually showing word recognition. Reading familiar books can teach her sight words and patterns that often go together. A literacy-rich environment of reading books, saying words and identifying letters can help her one day turn her word recognition into actual reading as she becomes comfortable with word patterns and isolated letter sounds, notes the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.
References
- "Applied Psycholinguistics"; Language Development, Metalinguistic Awareness, and Emergent Literacy Skills of 3-Year-Old Children; Cambridge University Press; 1994
- IES National Center for Education Statistics: Children's Specific Language, Literacy, Mathematics, Color Knowledge
- Baby Center: Your 3-Year-Old Now
- American Speech-Language-Hearing Association ©1997-2010 American Speech-Language-Hearing Association: Emergent Literacy
