Helping your child bloom with the power of stories, songs, and play!
Hello friends! I’m Sarah, your groovy Mod Flower Librarian, and I’m here to help you turn everyday moments into magical learning adventures. Early literacy isn’t about making your little one read early — it’s about building the foundation for reading through talking, singing, reading aloud, playing, and scribbling,
Here are some of my favorite tips to help your child grow strong literacy skills from birth to age 5.
Talk — Little Conversations, Big Growth
Talking with your child builds vocabulary and teaches them how language works. It doesn’t have to be fancy! Through listening to adults speak, they learn new words and their meanings, while also gaining essential knowledge about the world. This understanding helps them make sense of what they read.
Try this:
➜ Narrate your day: “Now I’m putting on my shoes — left foot first!” “I am spreading strawberry jam on this bread we got from the grocery store. Now let’s add some peanut butter!”
Benefits of Narrating Your Day:
- Increased vocabulary: Children are exposed to more words and their uses.
- Enhanced comprehension: They learn to understand the context and meaning of words.
- Improved communication skills: They learn how to use language to express themselves.
- Stronger language foundation: This practice helps build a solid foundation for future language development.
- Positive impact on brain development: Exposure to language-rich environments stimulates brain development.
- Supports social-emotional development: Talking about feelings and experiences helps children develop social-emotional skills.
➜ When reading books together, ask open-ended questions: “What do you think will happen next?” Asking open-ended questions during reading promotes children’s language and comprehension skills, encourages deeper thinking, and keeps them engaged. These questions require children to elaborate and express their ideas, fostering their oral language development and critical thinking skills. They also encourage children to connect what they are reading to their own experiences and prior knowledge.
➜ Repeat and expand: If your child says “doggy,” you might say, “Yes, that’s a big brown doggy wagging its tail!” The more unique words a child here’s on a regular basis from re-reading the same books over and over again, the more they will remember those words when it comes time to reading them.
➜ Children need to learn three key things about letters: their names, their shapes, and the sounds they make. You can help build these connections by naming letters you see on books, signs, or elsewhere in the environment, like spotting letter shapes in sidewalk cracks or buildings, and saying the letter sounds as you play or talk together. Talking about the print found all around helps children understand that print has meaning, which helps to prepare them to read.
❓ Delia loves asking questions when she feels curious or unsure. It helps her feel brave!
Sing — Music Makes Language Stick
Songs slow language down and help children hear the smaller sounds in words.
Try this:
➜ Sing nursery rhymes or Mod Flower tunes together. When we sing, words are stretched out and are easier to hear. This helps children notice the smaller sounds in words—an important skill for learning to read! Singing together also builds emotional bonds and makes learning joyful. When children feel safe and connected, their brains are more open to learning.
➜ Make up rhymes and sing them! “The frog is blue and he’s missing a shoe!” “The cat is red and she’s snoring in bed!” “The dog is brown and she’s wearing a gown!” Songs with repetition and rhyme help children remember new vocabulary and concepts. The catchy patterns make learning stick.
➜ Use your child’s name in a song: “Rain, rain, go away… Little Delia wants to play” Using a child’s name in a song can be a fun and engaging way to enhance their learning and connection to music. It helps them recognize their name, reinforces language skills, and fosters a sense of individuality and self-esteem.
➜ Sing routines: “This is the way we brush our teeth…” Using songs in daily routines can help make transitions smoother, build positive associations with tasks, and reinforce learning through repetition. Music can be a fun and engaging way to signal the start or end of an activity, or to motivate children to complete a task.
➜ Try singing songs with unusual vocabulary words! Typically, children hear a wider range of words in songs than in everyday conversation. Singing with your child introduces them to fun, descriptive, and sometimes unusual words they might not otherwise hear.
🐰 Dusty loves to count with songs. Try singing “1-2-3-4!” with bunny hops!
Read — It’s Never Too Early To Start
Sharing books with children is one of the most powerful ways to prepare them for reading. When you read together and talk about the story, children build vocabulary, gain background knowledge, improve comprehension, and learn how books work. Just as important, shared reading nurtures a lifelong love of books and stories.
Try this:
➜ Start young — even babies love the sound of your voice! It’s never too early to start reading to your child. Babies, 0-4 months, will especially thrive with black and white board books, books with high contrast patterns, books with soft flaps that make crinkle or rattle sounds, as well as books with faces. Babies don’t have fully developed color vision at birth but they can make out black and white images. Red is considered to be the first color babies can see, after black and white. Babies are also hard-wired to see faces, so books with photographs of other babies will be sure to delight them! Toddlers also enjoy books with pictures of other kids!
➜ Let your child turn the pages and point to pictures. This helps them become an active participant in reading and it’s fun for them. The more enjoyable reading is for a child, the more likely they are to become confident, independent readers. Try exploring a variety of books—pop-ups, wordless books, fiction, nonfiction—anything that sparks curiosity and excitement. Children are especially drawn to stories when they see themselves reflected in the pages, including their race, culture, and lived experiences.
➜ Keep books in arms reach. Don’t store books so high up on a shelf that a child has to ask for them. Children who have ample opportunity to spend time with books will naturally begin to understand how they work—how to hold them, turn the pages, and follow the text from left to right. These early experiences help prepare them to start reading with confidence when they begin school.
➜ Read the same book again and again — it helps the brain grow! Children may even memorize the words to their favorite books which helps them master any unusual vocabulary words within those books.
➜ Don’t worry too much about finishing a book, especially with babies and toddlers — follow your child’s lead and keep reading fun!
➜ Talking with children before, during, and after reading a story, encouraging them to retell it, and asking open-ended questions help them engage with the story and understand its sequence. These activities strengthen their comprehension skills and deepen their connection to the story.
➜ Playing with language—through rhymes, tongue twisters, and syllables—helps children develop phonological awareness, an essential early reading skill. Rhyming books, sing-along stories, and classic nursery rhymes all support this playful and important learning.
🎩 DJ says: “Reading is like watering the garden of your mind.”
Write — Scribbles Count!
Reading and writing are both ways to represent spoken words, tell stories, and communicate. When children have the opportunity to explore making marks, scribbling, drawing, and telling stories, they are building foundational reading skills.
Writing starts with drawing, scribbling, and playing with shapes and textures.
Try this:
➜ Let your child draw or paint freely — no need for instructions. Use a variety of writing utensils too, like markers, crayons, pencils, paint and water colors. This will help to strengthen fine motor skills. Practicing pulling the caps off markers, for example, helps to strengthen their hand muscles.
➜ If your child makes marks or scribbles something that resembles a letter, even though they may not have meant for it to be a letter, point it out! They may then start to recognize letters themselves. “Look, I made a T!” Drawing pictures and trying to write letters and words support a child’s development of print awareness. This process helps them understand that marks on a page can convey meaning. Letting children practice making lines, curves, and circles also helps them later intentionally write letters.
➜ Write their name while saying each letter aloud and use play dough to shape the letters in their name! Consider also using objects from nature, like twigs, rocks, or flower petals to shape letters together. Using things from nature is especially fun for kids!
➜ Ask children to express what they read about, or to create their own stories! Actively participating in writing keeps children excited and motivated to read stories themselves.
➜ Caregivers can prompt discussions by modeling writing for their children, and then discussing what they are writing and why. Talking about grocery lists, emails, or to-do lists provides opportunities to increase a child’s vocabulary while also encouraging writing.
➜ Some of the first stages of writing involve drawing pictures and then telling stories about what the pictures represent. Encourage a child’s narrative skills by saying, “Tell me about this picture!” or “What’s happening in this picture?”
🎨 Delia loves drawing her feelings — even just colorful swirls. That’s perfect.
Play — The Heart of All Learning
Play helps children make sense of the world and learn how to express themselves.
Try this:
➜ Encourage pretend play with puppets that have a movable mouth! Put on little puppet skits to demonstrate how moving the mouth while talking makes the puppet come to life. This will encourage them to try using a puppet to talk as the character and supports their language development.
➜ Provide opportunities to pretend play with dress up clothes! Dress-up and pretend play are incredibly beneficial for children’s development, fostering imagination, creativity, and social-emotional skills. They also help with language development, critical thinking, and problem-solving.
➜ Include opportunities to write in their dramatic play scenarios! For example, providing a pretend medical chart or a pretend prescription pad for kids to fill out while pretend playing as a veterinarian or doctor encourages them to practice writing. It’s also beneficial to include reading materials in the play scenarios, for example, by providing magazines in the pretend doctor’s office waiting room.
➜ Act out stories or emotions with toys or stuffies. Actively engaging in pretend play with toys or stuffed animals can be a valuable tool for helping children develop their understanding and expression of emotions. By using toys as characters, children can explore various scenarios, act out different emotions, and practice empathy and social skills. For example, you can use a pretend firetruck to have one figurine character rescue a toy figurine, pretend to drop off the figure in a safe location, and the character has to return to the doll house to get the rest of the figurines!
➜ Let your child lead — they are natural explorers! When a child’s play is centered on topics that interest them, they’re much more likely to be highly engaged in play, which benefits their overall development!
👽 Doris doesn’t speak, but she tells stories through her dancing. Every child has their own way to play.
Bonus Tip: Follow the Fun!
When kids are having fun, they’re learning. Be silly. Make up songs. Pretend you’re a flower growing out of the sidewalk. You’re doing it right.
🌈 Learning blooms when we nurture joy, connection, and curiosity.