Teacher Picks: Building Your Child’s Literacy Skills
When parents think about how to prepare their children for a successful school year, learning to master ABCs and 123s is always at the top of the list. To support our Noggin families, we asked our team of teachers to recommend fun activities in the Noggin app that children can do to practice these new skills.
Here are MORE teacher-approved activities that help build reading skills!
Find these activities easily by launching the Noggin app and tapping on the icons shown here:
1. Mission: Ranger Rescue
A recent storm has made a mess of everything! In this mission, your child will help Noggin friends Rocky, Molly, and Wally identify letter-sounds to clean up the national park! Being able to recognize letter-sounds will help your little one learn to sound out words and eventually, read!
2. Word Play: Exhibit
Learning new words helps children communicate and learn more about the world around them. Expose your child to new words through this Word Play, where they’ll become familiar with the word exhibit!
3. Storybook Skidoo
Your child will skidoo into a storybook and help Blue and Josh fix the story by practicing spelling words and making sentences.
4. Wallykazam!
In this series, words come to life through music and adventures with children’s favorite word whiz troll. Wally and his friends make words magical and introduce skills such as identifying letters and letter sounds, rhyming, and vocabulary development, which will help your child learn to read and write and boost their vocabulary.
Off-Screen Reading Readiness Activities Developed by Noggin’s Team of Teachers:
These cards help children recognize lowercase and uppercase letters and words that start with each letter. There are lots of ways you can use them to play with your child. Fasten a card to the refrigerator each morning and call it the letter of the day. Do a special activity that starts with that letter like finding objects around the house or thinking of words that starts with the letter of the day.
Knowing these words just by looking at them, without needing to sound them out, makes reading and writing easier and faster. There are lots of fun ways you can play with these cards every day – read a few while you eat a meal, before you read a book, or after you take a walk. Use the words to answer a “Question of the Day” together. For example, “How do robots walk?” You can even make your own word cards and write a story using the words. Draw pictures to go with it!
Building a Love of Literacy
Literacy is a skill that children build every day as they play, listen to sounds around them, and read books together with their grown-ups. From listening to music to noticing letters on street signs to reading during their bedtime routine, your child is building literacy skills all day, every day!
Everyday Ways to Build Literacy at Home:
- Talk, talk, talk! In order to learn words, children need to be exposed to them. By hearing you and talking with you throughout the day, your child will pick up tons of new vocabulary.
- Be a reading buddy. It’s never too early to look at and read books with your child. When you read together, you’re building your child’s familiarity with books (how to hold them and turn the pages) as well as their vocabulary and interest in a variety of topics!
- Create an author. Record on your phone or write down stories your child makes up. Encourage them to draw pictures to go along with the words. Seeing themselves as an author and illustrator will increase their love of literacy!
- Label away! Help your child create labels for the objects all around them. Attach the labels to the matching objects and read the labels together throughout the day. This will help your child understand that every object has a written word to describe it.