Supporting Literacy Learning at Home

When children know something about a topic before they read, it’s much easier for them to understand what they’re reading. Background knowledge helps them make connections, learn new words, and follow the story or information more easily. When children share their own cultures and experiences, everyone learns more and grows together.

• Talk about everyday moments such as cooking, shopping, or being outside to introduce new ideas and vocabulary. Ask questions, notice new things together, and explain new words in simple ways.
• Explore a wide range of topics together through a variety of books, videos, museums, and nature to build general knowledge.
• Invite your child to share their own culture and interests so they feel valued and everyone learns from one another.

Talking with children and exposing them to books from an early age helps build strong oral language skills. These early conversations and reading experiences lay the foundation for later learning. A child’s oral language skills in preschool are strong predictors of how well they will read as they grow.

• Talk with your child often during daily routines. Describe what you’re doing, ask simple questions about what they are doing, thinking and feeling.
• Read together every day, even for just a few minutes, and talk about the pictures, characters, and events to build understanding and vocabulary.
• Offer rich language experiences through songs, storytelling, pretend play, and conversations with family and friends to help your child develop strong speaking and listening skills.

When adults model how to use a book, children start learning important reading habits. They notice that books have titles and authors, that letters make up words, and that words form sentences. As they’re read to, children also learn that we read from left to right, top to bottom, and that sentences end with punctuation. These early understandings help build a strong foundation for reading.

• Show how books work by pointing out the title, author, and how to hold and turn pages.
• Notice print together like letters, words, and sentences while reading aloud, so children begin to see how print carries meaning.
• Point out directionality and punctuation by sliding your finger under the words and noticing end marks like periods or question marks as you read.

Text features like the table of contents, headings, glossaries, maps, charts, and diagrams help children find and understand information. As students become more independent readers, they learn to use these features to gather important details and support their understanding of the text.

• Point out text features such as headings, bold words, and the table of contents when reading together so children see how they help organize information.
• Use visuals like maps, charts, and diagrams to talk about what they show and how they add meaning to the text.
• Encourage your child to use text features independently by asking questions like “Where could we look to find that information?” to build confidence and understanding.

Phonological awareness is a child’s ability to hear and play with the parts of spoken words like rhymes, syllables, alliteration, and sound patterns. Phonemic awareness is a more advanced skill and involves hearing and working with individual sounds (phonemes) in words. These skills help children blend, break apart, and change sounds, which are important steps toward learning to read.

• Play with word parts by clapping syllables, noticing rhyming words, and enjoying songs or poems with repeating sounds.
• Help your child listen for individual sounds by stretching out simple words (like m‑a‑p) and having them blend the sounds together.
• Practice changing sounds in words. Try swapping the first sound in cat to make bat, or removing a sound to make a new word.

Phonics is a way of teaching reading that helps children connect letters to the sounds they make. Students learn to blend these sounds together to read words. When words do not follow regular patterns, students are taught helpful rules and patterns to figure them out. In the intermediate grades, phonics still plays an important role as students learn to read longer, more complex words. This instruction helps them build fluency and better understand challenging vocabulary. It also supports students who may still need practice with foundational reading skills.

• Teach letter‑sound relationships clearly and directly so children can blend sounds to read regular words and use rules and patterns to tackle irregular ones.
• Support decoding of multisyllabic words by breaking words into parts.
• Provide ongoing phonics practice to improve skills to develop confident, fluent readers.

Fluency means reading smoothly, accurately, and with expression. When children read fluently, they can focus on understanding what the text is saying. If they have to work too hard to sound out each word, it becomes difficult for them to remember and make sense of what they read. Read aloud to your child using a smooth, expressive voice so they can hear how good reading sounds, including the rhythm and tone.

• Share the learning. Take turns reading words, sentences or paragraphs with your child.
• Use repeated reading by having your child read the same short text more than once, either alone or with a partner, to build accuracy and confidence.

Vocabulary is the collection of words a child understands and can use to communicate. The more words children know, the easier it is for them to understand what they read and to express their ideas. Students learn new words by hearing them, seeing them, saying them, and writing them many times. Learning about word parts, such as prefixes and suffixes, also helps children understand meaning and figure out new words. Research shows that teaching students how words are built can significantly improve vocabulary growth.

• Use and explain new words often in conversations, books, and daily activities so children hear vocabulary in meaningful contexts.
• Teach child-friendly definitions and give children chances to see, hear, say, and write new words multiple times to help the words stick.
• Build word knowledge through morphology by exploring prefixes, suffixes, and root words, which helps children understand meaning and decode unfamiliar words.

Comprehension is a child’s ability to understand and make meaning from what they read. Strong comprehension grows when students have background knowledge, good phonological awareness, solid phonics skills, strong fluency, and a rich vocabulary. Students also learn comprehension strategies, such as making predictions, summarizing, asking questions, and connecting new information to what they already know. Instead of teaching these strategies one at a time, experts suggest using several together while reading so children get a fuller understanding of the text.

• Help your child build strong basics by talking about what they know, practicing sounds and phonics, building vocabulary, and reading smoothly.
• Use several reading strategies together by making predictions, asking questions, and talking about the story as you read.
• Have conversations about the book by asking what they noticed, what surprised them, or what they are still wondering about.