Supporting your Child’s Literacy Development

• Sing songs with your child to develop vocabulary, sequencing, and phonemic awareness
  • Examples: “Itsy Bitsy Spider” and “Three Little Monkeys Teasing Mr. Alligator”

• Read to your child regularly. Find books that match your child’s developmental level and interests.

• At the store, point out familiar letters and food labels to your child. Help your child develop an understanding of similarities and differences.

• Provide opportunities for your child to explore paint, crayons, and sensory materials such as shaving cream to promote pre-handwriting skills

• Use pictures to help your child build communication capacities and to develop an understanding that pictures and words have meaning.
  • Example: Place pictures of your child’s favorite foods on the refrigerator to show what is available. This makes it easier for your child to make a request.

Supporting your Child’s Math and Science Skills

• Point out numbers and count items in the environment.

• Example: Count the number of socks you find as you put the laundry away.
• Your child will develop a concrete understanding of numbers before he or she learns that a numeral represents a quantity.

• Encourage your child to sort and classify objects in a natural context.

• Example: Have your child help you sort the laundry (by color, type of clothing, or who the clothing belongs to).
• Your child will first learn to sort by color, shape, and size. This promotes classifying, discrimination, and sorting skills necessary for higher level math.

• Ask your child open-ended questions (questions with more than one right answer) that promote independent thinking and problem-solving capacities.

• What does it look like to you?
• How is this different?
• Describe what you see.

• Encourage your child to use various tools with supervision, such as scissors, crayons, markers, or scoopers.

• Help your child discover patterns in the environment. Songs and fingerplays help introduce your child to rhythm and patterns.

• Provide a variety of real-world experiences, such as visiting the zoo, playing at the playground, cooking, or planting seeds.

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