Literacy development is a vital part of your child’s education and honing these skills sooner rather than later can make all the difference when it comes to their academic success throughout the years. Even though for some children literacy isn’t the most enjoyable activity, it’s important for parents to help them realise it can be fun and engaging. Simple switches at home such as letting your child choose the kind of books they’re interested in and encouraging them to get really creative with their writing can start to help build up their literacy skill level without them even realising. Here’s 4 activities that will help develop literacy skills for primary school aged children.
Writing Creatively
Encouraging your kids to write creatively on a regular basis at home will not only be an enjoyable activity, but an excellent opportunity for them to practice using their writing skills outside of a school setting. In fact, it can help take the pressure off as they’re writing ‘freely’ without being graded, not to mention creative writing develops your child’s imagination, which has been proven to be important in critical thinking and problem solving. Whether it’s writing a fictional story, a cartoon strip, a journal, a blog, a letter, a menu or a list of all their favourite things, getting involved in this literacy activity will help remind them that writing can be a lot of fun.
Play Literacy-Based Board Games
Playing literacy-based board games helps children develop all the key skills that fall within the literacy bracket. Not only do kids have to read instructions and game cards, they will also need to speak clearly, describe objects without using key words, and listen to information that other players are giving them. Games such as Scrabble and Boggle also involve children writing down notes and information, and using random letters to create words, which can help them expand their vocabulary and flex their spelling skills. Here’s 7 must have literacy boosting board games to consider.
Reading Aloud
Reading aloud is a fantastic activity when it comes to developing literacy skills for a primary school child. Alongside practicing their reading, pronunciation and story following skills, hearing words out loud can actually help kids understand what they’re reading. This is because the act of reading aloud causes them to read slower, meaning they have much more time to process what they’re reading, which can really help to improve reading comprehension skills. We recommend trying to make this part of your daily routine, as it can have lots of beneficial gains for your child.
Book Chat
Another fun activity to help improve your child’s literacy skills is to discuss what books they’ve been reading- you could call it a book chat! Ask them to recap and summarise the main points of the story, as well as tell you what they have learnt. This in-depth chat and analysis will give them lots of practice in understanding as well as remembering the text, and a great opportunity to interpret the story in their own way, which is better known as ‘verbal processing.’ It’s also a good idea to come up with a set of questions as prompts, especially if you want to make this a literacy activity that’s a regular occurrence.
Questions To Ask
- Can you summarise the book? What did you like about it?
- Does the main character change in the story? How does the character change?
- If you could change the ending of this book, what would it be?
- What do you think is the story’s main message?
- Did the book turn out the way you thought it would?
