Early Literacy Archives - Empowered Parents

These posts offer practical tips and engaging, play-based activities to develop key skills like language, letter recognition, and pre-reading.

Whether you’re focusing on boosting listening abilities, developing sound awareness, or building pre-writing skills, you’ll find effective and enjoyable strategies for young learners.

Here are some early literacy posts to get started with:

Early Literacy Skills: What early literacy is and the 17 early literacy skills for preschoolers.

Language Activities: These are 15 of the best play-based ways to develop children’s language skills.

Pre-Reading Skills: Before kids can learn to read, they must develop 5 pre-reading skills. Here are 10 simple ways to build them.

Letter Recognition Activities: 14 fun ways to teach kids to identify letters.

Reading to Your Children: Here are 19 reasons why you absolutely must read to your children every day!

17 Ways to Improve Listening Skills: Listening skills affect speech and language, reading, following instructions, socializing and more. Here are more activities:
- Listen-and-Draw Activities: Build concentration and the ability to follow directions with these 10 prompts.
- Multi-Step Directions: Start with these 2-step directions and make your way up to 4 or 5-part instructions.

Play Auditory memory games and visual memory games with your preschoolers often!

Build higher-order thinking skills during story time and with other activities such as:
- Asking kids open-ended questions
- Critical thinking activities

Pre-Writing Activities: Why doing pre-writing activities before learning to write is a must, and simple ideas.
- Name Writing Activities: Here are 10 ways to teach kids to write their name.

From an early age, children are drawn to the rhythmic sounds of poems, songs, chants, and rhyming stories. Rhyming is more than just fun—it’s a key pre-reading skill for preschoolers that supports their development as they prepare for kindergarten and first grade. Detecting and manipulating rhyming sounds are aspects of phonemic awareness, which is crucial …

Here are some fun, simple pre-reading skills activities for preschoolers that are fun for home or school. What is Pre-Reading? Before any child can learn to read well and become a competent speller, five pre-reading skills must be mastered in order to lay a proper foundation. Pre-reading skills are important as they set children up to …

One of the most useful activities you can do every day while reading to your children at story time or bedtime, is to question them meaningfully in order to develop thinking skills. Through the use of some very basic types of open-ended questions, you will have your children thinking, analyzing, predicting, comparing, deciding, giving opinions …

Asking kids open-ended questions provides helpful insight into their critical thinking skills. Here is a look at what they are, the benefits of asking open-ended questions in early childhood and a list of example questions to use at home and school with your kids. There’s also a printable with these questions at the end of …

Would You Rather is a wonderful game for engaging young children and teaching them to think and reason. Play it at home, in class, while driving or prepping dinner. This is a fun collection of Would You Rather questions for preschoolers, kindergarteners and even older kids. There’s also a printable of these questions at the …

Early childhood is the ideal time to start developing literacy skills through play. Children need to develop certain skills before learning to read, as this helps build a solid foundation for formal literacy skills. Here’s some information on what early literacy is, how to develop it in 3-5-year-olds, 17 early literacy skills for preschoolers, and …

Learning to write is a process that starts long before a child can hold a pencil and write letters. Preschoolers need to learn important foundational skills, called pre-writing skills. The Process of Learning to Write There are several reasons why teaching kids to write too early will actually do more harm than good. It is …

Critical thinking is a valuable skill and one that young children should be actively taught. The best way to teach this to preschoolers and kindergarteners is through play activities, discussions and stories. Critical thinking is one of the higher-order thinking skills and is the process of analyzing information using logic, reasoning and creativity, in order …

Here are some fun name-writing activities for preschool kids to try at home or school. There’s also a printable of these activities at the end of this post. Ditch the boring tracing sheets and workbooks and try some of these real, hands-on learning experiences. When teaching children to write their names, remember these five key …

Childhood is a time filled with excitement and wonder. It is also a period in which kids learn a great deal, in order to develop physically, cognitively, socially and emotionally. Strong listening skills are connected to all four of these areas. Here’s why listening is important and how to develop this skill with simple ideas. …

Strong listening skills are very important during early childhood and can easily be developed through fun activities and games. One fun idea to try with your kindergartners and preschoolers is a drawing activity where they follow verbal directions. These can be random instructions (put a square in the top corner of the page, then colour …

Writing is a process that begins long before a child forms letters with a pencil. It involves building pre-writing skills during preschool, which are necessary for a child to be able to master letter formation and pencil control. Read on to find out about the importance of pre-writing skills for preschoolers and what simple activities …