Get Set, Get Ready, Let’s Read!

Children need to develop certain skills before they can learn to read.

Parents and other significant caregivers are a child’s first and best teachers. They can help children develop early literacy skills beginning at birth so that children are ready to learn once they begin school.

Every Child Ready to Read® provides strategies parents and caregivers can use to help children from birth to age five develop essential early literacy skills and get ready to read.

There are five simple but powerful practices that parents and caregivers can use to help young children get ready to read. They can easily be integrated into everyday activities to help children learn early literacy skills.

• Talking
  Talking with children helps them learn oral language, one of the most critical early literacy skills. The experience of self-expression also stimulates brain development, which underlies all learning.
• Singing
  Singing – which also includes rhyming – increases children’s awareness of and sensitivity to the sounds in words. This helps prepare children to decode print (written language).
• Reading
  Reading together, or shared reading, remains the single most effective way to help children become proficient readers.
• Writing
  Writing and reading go together. Writing helps children learn that letters and words stand for sounds and that print has meaning.
• Playing
  Play is one of the primary ways young children learn about the world. General knowledge is an important literacy skill that helps children understand books and stories once they begin to read.

Every Child Ready to Read® @ your library® is a program of the Association for Library Service to Children and Public Library Association, divisions of the American Library Association. Every Child Ready to Read® @ your library® is a registered trademark and is used with permission.

Printable activity packets

• Kindergarten readiness assessment
• Alphabet matching
• Puzzle scissor worksheets
• Shapes scissor worksheets

Booklists

Spotify playlist

A Spotify Playlist with some of our favorite kid friendly songs. You might recognize a few from storytime!