Developing Early Reading Skills in Babies, Toddlers, and Young Children

Kristin Reidy

Hi I’m Kristin Reidy. Former elementary school teacher and literacy coach, now mom to 3 littles. I have my BA in Elementary Education and my MA in Literacy Education.

Developing early literacy skills is easy, fun and takes relatively little work on your end, but has HUGE benefits for your child in the long run. These ideas can be implemented without many resources (besides books) and can start as soon as you bring your baby home from the hospital and extend all the way into the elementary years!

1. Read Everyday

What it Looks Like

Never underestimate how powerful reading everyday is for your child. From infancy and throughout childhood, reading just 1 book a day will develop literacy skills. Children begin to learn how language works, how stories work and how pictures and words work together to convey information.

Find a way to make it part of your routine! Read every night before bed, cuddle and read first thing in the morning, read before nap time!

Ages 0-3

Read easy picture books and board books. If you have a wiggly baby or toddler look for books with flaps, mirrors or textures. At this age it’s also not necessary to read every word on the page. If their attention span is short, just look at the pictures and discuss what you see.

Ages 3+

Continue to read picture books. Kids also begin enjoying more nonfiction/informational books. Encourage them to help you pick out the books you’re reading. Begin to look for simple books in a series. Series books are great because they have similar characters, settings and structures and children will begin to connect with the characters and themes.

Make Books Accessible

What it Looks Like

Make sure books are within easy reach of your children. Keep books all over your house-in their bedroom, in the playroom, in your family room. Also think about how you are displaying your books. While it may look aesthetically pleasing on social media to arrange your books by color or size, consider if that’s really the best way for your child to see and interact with the books. Book bins with the covers facing forward are much friendlier and an easy way for children to see and select their favorite books. If they can reach a bin, with the cover facing forward, they can easily find what they like!! We like to keep a rotating bin of books in our family room. These may be seasonal, holiday or new books. I change them out about every month to keep things interesting!

Ages 0+

It doesn’t matter what the age of your child is, try facing their books forward for easy interaction!

Pro Tip: We have a large collection of seasonal books because at an early age I began giving my kids books as gifts for holidays. On Halloween, everyone gets a new halloween or fall book, on Valentine’s Day, everyone gets a new Valentine book! Multiply that by 3 kids and you’ll have so many holiday and seasonal books you won’t know what to do with them all! (I keep them stored with our decorations).

Letters in Your Name

What It Looks Like

A great starting place to introduce letters is to start with the letters in your child’s name. You don’t have to start with the letter A, unless that’s the first letter in your child’s name! Teach them the letters in their name and how to identify them. This way when they head to school they will be able to find their name easy peasy!

Ages 2-3

Write their name on a piece of paper. Tell them the letters. Let them put dot stickers on each letter of their name!
Write their name on a piece of paper. Hide sticky notes with the letters around the house. Have them find the sticky notes and match them to the letters on the page.

Ages 4+

Write their name on a piece of paper. Have them use a special marker, pen or crayon to trace the letters of their name.

Letter Hunt

What it Looks Like

This is one of our favorite literacy activities in our house. Take post it notes, write some letters on them, hide the sticky notes around your home, then send your kiddos out to look for them!

Ages 2-3

Focus on the letters in their name to start, then move onto other letters.

Ages 3-4

Begin introducing upper and lower case letters. You may want to just do 1 letter and say “find all of the upper case Ls.” Once they locate all of those, “find the lower case ls!”.

Ages 5+

Use the same letter hunting concept but begin to use letter sounds. Find the letter that sounds like A in apple, find the the letter that sounds like I in igloo…

Chalk Letters

What it Looks Like

Get those kiddos outside, moving and working with letters/words! There are so many options with this! The basic gist is kids use some sort of motion, walk, hop, jump, skip, leap to get around to their letters or words!

Ages 2-4

Write letters they know on your driveway. Call out a letter and tell your child how to move to the letter. Example: “skip to the letter M.” “Run to the letter J.”

Ages 4+

Write letters or sight words on the driveway. Call out a letter, sound or sight word and tell them how to move there! Example: “leap to the word AND.”

All Ages

Pull out the hose or water balloons and have them “erase” the letters or words by spraying them away as you call it out.