4 - 5 years
Activities & Games
When preschoolers are engaged literacy learners, they are laying the foundation for becoming capable readers and writers in school.1
Alphabetic Fluency
*All images are clickable links.
Phonological Awareness
Phonics
Vocabulary
Grocery Store Vocabulary
Use the items on the grocery shelf to give your child practice finding something above their belly button, below their nose, on the bottom shelf, and between other items on a shelf. Opportunities to use superlatives, those little endings that help describe size, are all around the grocery store. Have your child find a big fruit, a bigger fruit and the biggest fruit in the produce section. What's the smallest item in the cart? The largest item?
Categories: This game teaches children new words as well as their meaning, context and the relationship between words.
Choose a category – fruit, kitchen, the zoo, music, clothes, etc.
Make a long string of words that belong in the category by taking turns adding words.
Each word may only be said once.
If you repeat a word, choose a word that doesn’t belong or simply run out of ideas, choose a new category and start again.
Stay motivated by writing down the record of how many words are in a category and attempt to beat it.
Comprehension
Book in a Bag Ideas
Put together a few small props or pictures that represent the story
Pull them out one at a time and invite the children to make a prediction about the story
Preschoolers (and many older students!) are visual learners. When the teacher sits down to read a story with a mysterious bag full of objects, it is guaranteed to grab their attention! Fill a gift bag with items and pictures from the story and pull them out one at a time. As each item is revealed, encourage the students to make a prediction about the story. What is it going to be about? Here is an example for a bag of objects for There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Rose!
