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- Hello, my name is Donna Mojarro.
I am a Lead Teacher at The Early Childhood
Education Center here at UCSD.
As an early childhood educator,
I plan and set up literacy-rich activities
to help young children develop and learn.
I will be sharing pre-reading and pre-writing activities
that you can share at home with your child
to create that home to school connection.
Did you know that children begin their path to reading
as babies when they hear and respond
to the sound of a human voice?
Literacy is the ability to comprehend
and communicate through reading and writing.
It begins as babies understand your spoken words.
Listening, talking, reading, and writing
are all parts of the early literacy learning
and they are all connected.
You may ask yourself, what do most young children learn
about literacy in the preschool years?
They learn to name and rhyme alphabet letters,
hear rhymes in sounds and words,
recognize their name and write their own names.
Using new vocabulary words in their conversations.
They listen to stories and understand what they hear.
Providing young children with many opportunities
to hear and understand spoken language is essential.
It is important that we nurture a love for reading,
use new words in day-to-day conversation,
recognize and write their own names,
hear rhymes and sounds, for example,
nursery rhymes and songs.
Reading out loud together.
And offering alphabet activities,
for example, ABC stamps, ABC magnetic letters
for them to manipulate.
Holding meaningful and thoughtful provoking conversations
with your child is very important.
Talk about things that he did
or things she finds interesting.
While you listen and respond to what your child says,
you can introduce new words.
For example, if you're talking about a car,
you can also say, you know, is that your automobile?
Which is a word that they might not
listen to or have heard before,
but it is a new word for them to have in their vocabulary.
We can expand on what they say,
offering more description and using more mature language.
For example, if a child may say, "my paper broke,"
you can say, "oh, I see your paper ripped."
So changing that broke to ripped to introduce that word.
Providing a cozy reading corner
is something that we do in our classroom.
And you can do this at home, too.
You can support children with time and space
to explore books and print by creating a cozy book corner.
You can also make a menu, for example,
with a printout of a restaurant
where they can pretend that they're cooking
or that they're going to be a server or a waiter.
You can staple sheets of paper together
to write and draw a story.
You can add books, magazines, pens, paper,
crayons, notepads to a basket and add a cozy book area.
I actually have one with me.
So we can add all sorts of like little things like this.
And we have some, any kinds of books
that you can add on here.
You can add some crayons.
You can add easels.
You can add these little stampers.
All sorts of little things where the children feel engaged
and they can feel invited to read it.
We even have some like alphabet cards and whatnot.
And if this is in a spot where your child
can kind of feel that they're invited,
they can walk on over and do it for themselves.
Research has found that one of the most
important things parents can do
to help their child build reading
and writing skills is to read out loud.
To make the most of your time together,
you can read out loud, at least once every day.
You can read favorites again and again.
You can talk about the story
before, during and after reading,
you can ask their teacher what kinds of books
that they're interested in that school
so that you can also read at home.
And you can share our a variety of literature,
stories, poems, informational books.
You can suggest activities that go with the books.
For example, if you are reading a book
where a child is talking about their lunch
or what the child was eating in the book,
you can discuss, what would you like for lunch today?
Just so that they can have that relation
from the book to their home.
Now moving onto pre-writing skills.
In order for your young child to become successful writers,
they must first be introduced
to the prerequisite skills in the proper order.
Every child progresses through these skills
at a different rate, based on his or her
own individual levels of development.
Fine motor skills involve the small muscles of the body.
And these are very important
to start these pre-writing skills.
These small muscles need to be developed
because they are required for more advanced tasks,
such as writing, grasping small objects
and fastening clothing.
When we refer to fine motor skills
in the context of handwriting,
we are typically referring to the small muscles
in the hands and fingers used for writing.
Young children benefit from daily practice
to help develop fine motor skills
in their fingers and hands.
Children should have strength and dexterity
in their hands and fingers before they can be expected
to hold a pencil or even master writing letters.
Children should develop the strength and dexterity
in their hands and fingers to successfully
accomplish these tasks without frustration or anxiety.
And the most important thing is that
you can have fun with it.
Students will strengthen those muscles in the classroom,
for example, as we provide fun, hands-on,
developmentally appropriate activities on a daily basis.
These activities also help children develop
an appropriate pencil grasp when they are ready.
Emergent writing is young children's
first attempts at the writing process.
Children, as young as two years old,
begin to imitate the act of writing
by creating drawings and symbolic markings
that represent their thoughts and ideas.
This is the beginning of a series of stages
that children progress through as they learn to write.
For example, if you see the art of a two-year-old,
you might see a lot of scribbles, a lot of circles,
and a lot of just lines and the whatnot.
In a three-year-old's drawing,
you might see a little bit more detail,
but you really get to see, in the 4 year old drawings,
more of that specific description of what they're drawing.
You can see eyes, if they're drawing their self portrait.
You'll see some ears, you'll see a nose.
You might see hands and feet.
So that is a way to see how your child's progressing
with the emergent writing.
You can invite your child to practice
their fine motor skills with the following activities.
You can use tweezers to pick up cotton balls,
for example, or small items.
I have something here that I could share with you.
If you have a bottle of water,
for example, you know, an empty one,
and you have some small tweezers,
you can just have a child pick up pompoms.
You can have them pick up their Cheerios
if they have, you know, during breakfast.
And just this movement of pressing down and up
on the tweezers is something that's really helpful for them.
And they can just kind of put it inside.
You can also use pipe cleaners with a colander.
You might be cooking at home and you might have,
or anything that small,
some toothpicks if they're a little older,
with a little colander, for example.
And this is a great practice that they can do,
and you can just kind of have them press
and really, you know, focus
and put those little pipe cleaners in.
And then they can just keep on going.
Another great way to improve those fine motor skills
in young children is Play-Doh.
Play-Doh, I want to say is the biggest,
I always say best in my personal opinion,
the perfect item, material to have
at home or in your classroom.
It helps them kind of press and, you know,
really manipulate the Play-Doh
and it will work on those
fine motor skills and that grasping.
You can add a clothes pins to yarn,
you can add water to a spray bottle, for example, at home.
And just manipulating that hand,
that pressure that they do to squeeze is really important.
And you will see the development in those skills.
If you have paper,
if you have anything at home that they can tear
in a magazine, an ad from the newspaper, even tearing,
if you don't child children's scissors at home.
You know, just tearing is a really good
way to improve on those skills.
Thank you for joining me today.
I hope that the examples I shared with you today
can be a resource for you to use at home with your child.
Growing and learning are complex tasks.
So each child's development will look different.
Each child grows at his or her own pace.
It is our responsibility to nurture, encourage,
and provide stimulating activities in their environment
to promote these pre-reading and pre-writing skills.
Thank you.
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