What is emergent literacy in early childhood

Reflections

What do you observe?

Answers may include:

• The home visitor asks what can be found in the alphabet book and then asks if the mother can find something in the alphabet book.
• Isaiah, the boy, stirs in the bowl and then picks up a plastic carrot and pretends to eat.
• Linea, the girl, points to an object in the book.
• The mother says she sees one, and the home visitor turns the book over to the mother and asks her to turn until she finds something.
• Isaiah climbs into Mom's lap and picks up a piece of plastic melon.
• Mom asks if the children can find an eggplant.

What strategies does the home visitor use to promote emergent language and literacy development?

Answers may include:

• Home visitor engages the mother directly by asking her to interact with her child and the book.
• Home visitor provides concrete objects and visual and auditory cues for the parent and child to help develop language and literacy skills.
• Home visitor models the specific language learning skill she wants the parent to communicate with her child (e.g., "Can you find something in the book [that matches a fruit or vegetable on the floor]?")
• Home visitor establishes appropriate boundaries by encouraging the mother and child to engage in the activity together.
• Home visitor encourages the mother to recreate the experience she models with her children.
• She introduces the book and book reading.

How might the home visitor achieve similar goals with materials found in the home?

Answers may include:

• Take pictures of food and other objects found in the home and make books
• Use food or other objects found in the family's home as concrete objects to match with objects found in a book
• Cut out pictures in magazines to match objects
• Identify objects in the environment
• Read the print on cereal boxes, newspapers, and magazines
• Pretend to write during pretend play (e. g., checks in a restaurant, invoices for purchases, to-do or shopping lists)

What other developmental domains do you observe?

Answers may include:

• Social and Emotional Development
  • The child climbs in the mother's lap
  • The mother speaks to her child gently
  • One of the children smiles during the video clip
• Perceptual, Motor, and Physical Development
  • They discuss vegetables and fruits
  • Isaiah grasps and stirs
  • Isaiah balances and climbs on Mom's lap
  • Linea points, using eye-hand coordination
• Approaches to Learning
  • Attention: Both children attend to the home visitor and their mother
  • Curiosity: Isaiah explores the characteristics of the plastic fruit and vegetables
  • Information gathering: Isaiah is learning about plastic fruit with his hands and mouth
• Cognition
  • Pretend play: Isaiah uses the fruit to stir in the bowl and pretends to taste the carrot
  • Connecting experiences and information: Isaiah and Linea are learning and comparing the characteristics of plastic fruit and vegetables, pictures of fruit and vegetables, and real fruits and vegetables in their experience

What other reflections do you have?

Answers may include:

• What more might you like to know about the children and family to support their development?
• What other strategies would you consider to promote language and literacy with this family?

Emergent Literacy: Learn More

News You Can Use: Foundations of School Readiness: Language and Literacy
Infants and toddlers learn about language and literacy through meaningful interactions with nurturing adults. Discover strategies teachers, home visitors, and family child care providers can use to support children's emerging language and literacy skills. A study guide accompanies the resource.

Emergent literacy has been defined as "those behaviors shown by very young children as they begin to respond to and approximate reading and writing acts."

Braunger, J. & Lewis, J.P. (1998) Building a Knowledge base in reading. Newark, DE: International Reading Association (p. 16).

Read more:

Home visiting, Literacy, Language

,  School Readiness

Resource Type: Article

National Centers: Early Childhood Development, Teaching and Learning

Last Updated: March 18, 2022

What It Is And Why It’s Important

What Is Emergent Literacy?

Emergent literacy is the stage during which children learn the crucial skills that lead to writing and reading.

Literacy builds on the foundations of language to include the advanced ways in which we use language to communicate — primarily through reading, writing, listening, watching, and speaking with one another.

Components Of Emergent Literacy

Emergent literacy is made up of several different parts. Your child will encounter these essential components as they begin to explore reading. They include:

• An interest and enjoyment in print — handling books and relating them to their stories or information.
• Print awareness: how to handle a book, reading from left to right. Your child recognizes pictures and some symbols, signs, or words.
• An interest in telling and listening to stories. They attend to, repeat, and use some rhymes, phrases, or refrains from stories or songs.
• They make marks and use them to represent objects or actions. An understanding that words are made up of letters, recognizing letters when they see them.
• Your child comprehends meaning from pictures and stories.

And the list goes on! Really, emergent literacy components help your child understand the basic tools they’ll need to read all sorts of books and other materials in the future.

Why Is Emergent Literacy Important?

Almost every skill we learn in life requires some preliminary learning in order to finally achieve mastery. For example, you probably didn’t wake up one day knowing how to make pancakes (although if you did, we would love to learn your secrets!).

Instead, you first had to learn what ingredients you needed, how much to measure each item, how long to cook the batter, and so on.

Reading and writing require these same preparatory steps, also known as emergent literacy.

Emergent literacy preps your child’s brain with the skills they’ll need to learn how to read. And while this may sound complex, many emergent literacy skills develop naturally!

When your child points at something and you follow their direction or when you call their attention to noises, objects, or people in their surroundings by speaking to them, you’re helping your child develop emergent literacy skills.

You’re helping them acquire the same tools they’ll incorporate into their future learning, from reading their very first storybook to writing a master’s thesis.

Supporting Your Child’s Emergent Literacy Skills

Here are some fun and easy ways you can stimulate your child’s emergent literacy skills at home.

Read Aloud

Reading aloud is the most effective way for a child to learn to love books and the power of stories. Loving to read begins with loving to listen to stories!

Our team at HOMER believes that investing in read-aloud sessions with your child substantially improves many of the skills they need on their lifelong reading journey.

For emergent readers, there are few things more wonderful (or effective) than sitting down with mom or dad and uncovering the worlds that live between the covers of a book.

With you as their guide, your child will grow more confident and reassured as they gradually learn about the things they love (like how many different types of dogs exist or how the sky makes rainbows).

Reading aloud to your child also helps strengthen their imagination and build their curiosity. While listening to you recount the wonderful world inside of a story, your child’s mind will be actively running through images, scenarios, and all the colorful possibilities that lie beyond the page.

Reading aloud is one of the easiest, most rewarding ways for you to bond with your child while helping them learn. Consider that by reading aloud to them and encouraging their participation, you are empowering them as learners.

Additionally, you will reap the benefits of understanding their interests more deeply, engaging with their budding imagination, and instilling confidence in their learning process.

Let Your Child Take Charge

As your child grows, their sense of independence and autonomy continues to develop. While we know these early years are precious, we also know you’re hopeful your child will grow into a strong, independent learner who reads well and frequently.

Allowing your child to assert their unique personality and independence every now and then can be beneficial in engaging their emergent literacy skills.

These moments may seem small at first, but even the simplest freedoms in your child’s routine can have huge impacts on their individualism! It’s all about allowing your child to exert a certain amount of control over their reading time.

For example, instead of you turning the pages during your reading time together, allow your child to dictate when the pages should be turned. This may take some getting used to for them as they learn the pace of reading aloud in conjunction with the words they see printed.

You can also let them experiment with narrating! Even if your child cannot read yet (we know they’re called emergent readers for a reason!), allowing them to use their toddler-talk through the story shows them that they will read one day not far away.

Finally, letting your child pick out the book you’ll read together is a great way to engage their sense of independence. It gives them something to look forward to while reading with you and also gives you insight into their interests.

If you find your child keeps reaching for the same book multiple times, don’t worry — rereading is highly beneficial, too!

Take Your Time

Don’t be afraid to slow it down for your child while you’re reading together, or even just in your daily speech.

We know we’re all guilty of it. For so long, our babies aren’t sure how to “properly” talk back yet, so there may be the occasional time when we find ourselves mumbling to our baby without really engaging them, or simply saying nothing at all!

Taking time to be more conscientious of the ways in which you talk to your child, especially in their very young years, can help them gain the skills they’ll need to read, speak, and write.

Especially when reading together, there’s no need to rush! We recommend taking your sweet time. Even if it’s just with one page of a book at a time, slow down and ensure your child is engaged.

Consider these questions:

• Does your child recognize every animal on a page?
• Do they know what color this character’s hair is or whose hair it resembles in your family?
• Do they know what sound a truck makes?
• When you say the word “surprise,” does your child react in a way that conveys understanding (throwing their hands up in exclamation or even clapping)?

Addressing these questions can help you and your child slow down and take in all the details that are in a story.

Keep The Conversation Going

If you like the idea of our last emergent literacy strategy, this one pairs perfectly with it!

We know half of the adventure in helping your child learn to read is figuring out what gaps in their understanding still need to be filled. The other part of the journey is keeping them engaged and interested and seeing how far your conversations with one another can go!

As your child expands their vocabulary and begins utilizing it, we encourage you to elaborate on the things they may point out to you. For example, if you’re walking together and they see a dog, they may point at it and say, “puppy!”

In any scenario like this, following up their observation with a cheer is great. Following up with more questions is even better! After affirming they saw the right thing (or correcting them if they mistakenly called it a kitty, for example), ask them about details and descriptions.

You could say, “Does this puppy have long ears? Yes, he does! Feel how soft his ears are. Isn’t his fur shiny, brown, and so soft? What a cute puppy.”

Injecting these details and descriptions into your conversations might feel silly, but it helps your child immensely!

By expanding on the image they identified, you’re directly contributing to their understanding of the scene in front of them. The next time they see a puppy in a park, they may take your lead and say, “Look! A big puppy!”

This progress shows that your child’s emergent literacy is growing!

Let Your Child “Write”

Emergent literacy incorporates writing as well as reading. This may sound a little crazy — how can your child write if they don’t know how to read yet?

While your child may not be able to correctly write out words, we certainly encourage you to let them try! Even if it’s just scribbling, allowing your child to practice “writing” gets their brain going in the right direction.

It also prepares them for what writing is really like and shows them that they have the power to put words on paper. There are stages of learning how to write, and scribbling is the first step!

Asking for your child’s help with writing out short tasks can boost their confidence and their excitement about learning to write. Good options include grocery lists, birthday cards, get-well-soon cards, thank you notes, or notes for their siblings and family.

Whatever keeps them excited and engaged is a great vehicle for motivating their writing skills!

Emergent Literacy Is Just The Beginning!

We know that emergent literacy is only the start of your child’s reading and writing journey.

While you and your child are probably thrilled at the idea of their eventual independence and confidence when it comes to handling books, it’s going to take some time. And that’s perfectly OK!

Every child is different and will learn how to read and write in their own time. The important part is enjoying the adventures you have together on the way there!

We hope our emergent literacy tips were helpful! If you ever want to change up your routine and explore new ways to touch on these skills, our Learn & Grow app is a great place to start! The personalized practices will give your child the tools they need for their learning journey.

Author

Early childhood literacy

Preschoolers learn a lot about written language long before they learn to read and write in traditional ways. And this is quite natural: children live in a world full of written symbols. Every day they observe and themselves take part in various activities related to books, calendars, lists and inscriptions. Gradually, they learn to understand how written symbols convey meaning. Children's active efforts to develop literacy skills through informal experiences are called emergent literacy.

Younger preschoolers look for familiar elements of written speech when they “read” fairy tales that they remember and recognize familiar inscriptions. However, they do not yet understand the symbolic function of the printed word. Many preschool children believe that one letter stands for a whole word. At first, they do not even distinguish between drawing and writing. Around the age of four, some of the distinctive features of block text appear in their writing, such as the alignment of figures. However, at the same time, children often use drawing elements - for example, write the word "sun" with a yellow felt-tip pen or draw it in the form of a circle. They express their understanding of the symbolic function of drawings in the “drawing” of letters.

The development of literacy skills is based on speaking and knowledge of the world around. Over time, children's progress in language acquisition and literacy skills begin to support each other. Phonological awareness, that is, the ability to analyze and use the sound structure of colloquial speech, which is evidenced by sensitivity to changes in the sounds that make up words, as well as to rhyme and mispronunciation, is considered an indicator of advanced emergent literacy. Combined with an understanding of the correspondences between sounds and letters, this ability allows children to isolate fragments of speech and associate them with the corresponding written characters. Vocabulary and grammatical knowledge also play an important role in this process. In the course of story conversations between an adult and a child, various speech skills are improved, which are of great importance for the development of literacy.

The more informal opportunities for learning literacy skills that preschool children have, the better their speech and emergent literacy, and subsequently their reading skills, are developed. By drawing children's attention to the fact that letters stand for sounds, by playing games with speech and sounds, adults increase children's awareness of the sound structure of speech and how it is displayed in written text. Interactive reading and discussion of the content of the book with preschoolers stimulates different aspects of the development of speech and literacy skills. Children benefit greatly from adult help with writing assignments in the form of a composition, such as writing a letter or a story.

Read about how to support self-learning in early childhood literacy in the Idea Fair section.

Based on materials from the book "Child Development" by Laura Burke.

Development of fine motor skills of hands in young children in the process of visual activity | Article on drawing (younger group):

Development of fine motor skills of hands in young children in the process of visual activity

The body's motor system - motor skills - describes the ability of the body to control the process of movement. To perform motor skills, the brain, muscles and nervous system must work together. Motor skills are divided into two main groups: large, which includes actions such as walking, jumping, tilting, etc .; and petty, which includes the ability to manipulate small objects.

Fine motor skills are essential for many aspects of self-care during childhood, such as putting on shoes, feeding yourself, brushing your teeth. Fine motor skills are also critical to the development of emergent writing.

Art classes develop fine motor skills, initiate the work of brain areas responsible for speech, visual and motor memory, as well as thinking. During drawing, both hemispheres of the brain are involved, interhemispheric connections appear and increase. Therefore, it is so important to pay special attention to the visual activity of the child at an early age.

The child's drawing reflects the development of his fine motor skills, eye-hand coordination. Children's drawings mature as they develop their ability to properly hold and control a pencil.

In the process of visual activity, due to the development of the child's fine motor skills, emergent literacy is also improved - the child's knowledge of reading and writing skills before he learns to read and write words.

So, for example, "emergent writing" is already detected in babies. When coloring, they make marks in different colors or paint sections of paper in one color. Also, children draw wavy or uneven lines with a pencil, moving from left to right, just like adults do. Often they may say that they are recording something. This is the manifestation of the skill of emergent writing. That is why it is important to give children so much drawing practice, as it is the forerunner of writing and the further intellectual development of the child.

To ensure the productivity of drawing with a child, follow these steps:

1. Prepare a place to work

Children often get lost in their creativity, so it is important to provide them with a workplace where they can feel comfortable with you. Children often try to draw on every available surface and don't pay attention to where the paint goes

2. Make sure the child is dressed appropriately for drawing

Dress the child in clothes suitable for applying paint, such as an old T-shirt and trousers, and tie up his hair, if necessary, so that it does not get into the paint. The child should not be afraid to get dirty, he should be relaxed in his movements.

3. Choose safe drawing media

When drawing with a child, only use materials that meet the required specification, meaning that the materials are not dangerous for children and are safe to handle.

4. Prepare paper or canvas

Many children enjoy the freedom of having large sheets of white art paper on which they can draw and play with color and texture. Therefore, it is worth considering in advance on which nominal paper the child will draw.

After making sure that these steps are completed, you can proceed to drawing with the child, however, some provisions should also be observed:

1. Help the child with the beginning of the drawing

Base colors can be applied to a pattern to give the child a base. If the child expresses his idea, then be open to his suggestions, because it is at this moment that individuality develops. Often children come up with their own images and themes by drawing and being creative. Encourage your child to express himself however he sees fit and avoid correcting his drawing. When drawing, the child should feel free to explore different representations and images and have fun.

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