For parents interested in helping their children learn to read I have a few suggestions for books that are fun and reinforce emergent literacy skills that are central to learning to read, like print knowledge. Print knowledge refers to knowledge that children gain about print from reading with adults and from looking at books. Specific print knowledge that young children are picking up in these early pre-literate stages are things like left-to-right orientation of text, that books are read from front to back, and letter recognition skills.

Attention to Print

Books that bring a child’s attention to the text are great. They help children learn to pay attention to the text of a book, and reinforce the fact that the words being read by the adult are derived from the text. This may seem obvious, but to preschool kids it is not so apparent. Anyone who has watched their two or three year old “read” a book will understand. For very young children, developing their print knowledge, is an important step towards skilled reading.

Recommendations

Some of my favourite kid’s books that bring children’s attention to print are by Dr. Seuss. Many of his books, such as One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, or The Foot Book exhibit these features on almost every page. Text of different colours, textures, and orientations make the print more noticeable. When features like this are employed, children naturally attend to the details of the text and build up their print knowledge.