How To Develop Print Awareness

Reading. An important skill to develop in early learners. Some children pick it up faster, while others may take a longer time or even struggle to read.

If you want your child to have a head start at reading, it is important to instil the love of books and stories from the start. Read to your child and cultivate the love of books at a young age. I cannot stress this enough (that even a baby is not too young to read).

A baby learning to read? Well, not literally. But when he hears your voice, a lot of things are taking place. The baby learns to decipher the tones in your voice. They also piece the words they hear and the pictures together thereby acquiring vocabulary used in speech as they grow.

Introducing books to your child from the beginning helps him develop Print Awareness.

Print Awareness

1. It is the knowledge of how to handle a book. For example, text is read from left to right and top to bottom.
2. To identify the front and back cover as well as the spine of the book.
3. To identify the beginning letter of a sentence (i.e uppercase) and the punctuation at the end.
4. To be able to handle a book with the help of page numbers.
5. To be able to point to a letter, a word and a sentence respectively.
6. To understand that print is related to the spoken language.

Ways to develop Print Awareness (For toddlers)

1. Read to your child
2. Look at different forms of print around you. (i.e calendar, posters, sinage, labels etc.)
3. Pretending to write words, shopping list etc.
4. Learning to write his name
5. Label items in the room

Reading to your child: (For preschoolers age 4-6)

Here are some things you can do to intentionally increase print awareness when reading to your child. Don't worry, you don't have to do them all in one sitting. Just pick and choose what you'd like to focus on. I suggest just one section per reading. For example, for the reading session today/tonight (if you read to them before bedtime) you will just focus on things to do before reading the book. Then another session you focus on things to do during reading a book.

Before reading the story...
1. Highlight the title of the book, the author and the illustrator. Explain to him what each one means (i.e the title gives you the gist of the story, the author is the person who wrote the story and the illustrator is the person who drew the pictures)
2. Do picture talk. Starting with the cover page, ask your child "What do you think this story is about?" Then, do the same with each page; allow your child to tell you how he thinks the story goes.
3. Skim through the story and jot down vocabulary that may be tricky to understand. Explain this to him first.

During reading...
1. Ask questions like "What do you think will happen next?" You can ask this every now and then but not too often or it'll spoil the flow of the story and appreciation for the text.

After reading...
1. Ask questions like "Who were the main characters in the story? What happened to him/her? How did the story end? What can you learn from this story? Did you like the story? Why?"


Choice of books
For emergent readers choose books with the following:
1. Simple and short sentences.
2. Large print with clear pictures.
3. A story that uses repeated sentence structure. For example:
4. A story that uses rhyming words