Early Literacy Step #2

Step Two: Make Reading a Habit.

Father reads book to a baby

Bedtime is perfect for story time. (Illustration by John Bianchi.)

Make daily bedtime stories and weekly visits to the library part of the family routine.

Kids will learn that reading is an important part of the household routine and they’ll look forward to  to their regular stories.

And parents will find that a book is the perfect bait for getting kids into bed at night.

As my kids got older, the switch to novels made it even harder to skip story time because we all wanted to know what was going to happen next. And our library visits often because scavenger hunts as we tracked down books by our favourite authors and illustrators.

See all 10 kid-literacy steps on YouTube.

This post brought to you by The Troubles with Bubbles, a free multi-touch ebook for the iPad. Check it out here.

Story Talk Videos

This week, Bungalo Books happily unveiled two videos it produced to help parents build their pre-schoolers’ language skills. The two short videos were created for Kingston Literacy and Skills with funding from the Kingston-Cataraqui branch of Rotary International.

Ten Steps to Early LiteracyThe Story Talk project proves that teachers and writers can find an entertaining middle ground when it comes to teaching kids and parents about books.

When literacy experts Deb Nesbitt-Munroe and Susan Riley approached me last summer, they were keen to promote the process of “dialogic reading” to their organization’s clientele of young parents. By the end of our first meeting, I had Continue reading