Early literacy is everything children know about reading and writing before they can do it themselves. Starting as newborns, children are developing literacy skills that will help them with more advanced concepts later in their lives. Incorporating literacy in your child's everyday life can give your child a great head start when they enter school. It's never too early to start early literacy skill building.

Lilybug Learning helps children with their early literacy learning efforts using reading, talking and playing techniques that help develop the skills essential for reading success when your child is older. We continually expose your child to oral and written language, and through pictures, play, and the print that combine to help your child understand the symbolic representation that underlies reading and writing.

Lilybug Learning incorporates literacy into all our daily activities both informally within various activities and games and formally with dedicated time for learning basic literacy skills. We use a variety of age appropriate, guided play strategies to develop preschool reading, such as:

• Reading time: Group reading teaches children story comprehension skills while the children listen and actively participate in the story.
• Poetry: Nursery rhymes, songs, and poetry help children to learn phonemic awareness, word families and that speech is made up of sounds, syllables, and words.
• Storytelling: Listening, pictures, acting and puppet shows teach story structure and helps children learn to predict outcomes.
• The printed word: Surrounded by letters and words in books, signs, bulletin board and exercises you child will learn written words correspond to spoken words, that words are composed of letters, and that sentences are made up of words.
• The alphabet: Alphabet books and puzzles help children learn the relationship between sounds and letters, and give them practice recognizing initial letter sounds, word rhythm and word shapes.
• Writing and spelling: Writing is incorporated into daily activities such as writing captions for pictures, stories for drawings and responses to curriculum.
• Dramatic play: Children exercise their imaginations, practice their communication skills, and learn the subtleties of spoken language in dramatic play and dress-up games.
• Language concepts: Exploration of basic concepts related to common items such as animals, movement, sounds, size, shape matching and opposites help your child understand the world around them and their role in it.
• Date and time concepts: Basic concepts related to time, weather, night and day, week days, seasons and the calendar help create structure and routine for your child.
• Common nouns: Recognition and use of everyday items such as parts of the body, clothing, household items, action verbs and senses familiarize your child with functioning in their every day world.