Preschool Literacy Newsletter: What to Tell Families About Early Reading

Reading does not begin when a child opens a first-grade reading primer. It begins in preschool, in conversations at the dinner table, in lap-reading with a parent, in learning to notice that words go from left to right and that letters make sounds that combine into meaning. Families who understand this become active partners in literacy development. Families who do not often wait for kindergarten to start "real" reading instruction, missing the most important window.

A literacy newsletter is one of the most valuable things a preschool teacher can send, because it gives families the information and tools to make a genuine difference at home.

What Early Literacy Includes (and What It Does Not)

Early literacy is not about teaching children to read in preschool. It is about building the foundation that reading instruction can work on later. That foundation includes several distinct but related skills:

• Phonological awareness: The ability to hear and play with the sounds in words. This includes rhyming, hearing syllables, and noticing beginning sounds.
• Print concepts: Understanding that text carries meaning, that it goes left to right, that spaces separate words, and that letters are different from numbers.
• Vocabulary: The larger a child's vocabulary entering kindergarten, the faster they become fluent readers, because comprehension requires understanding what decoded words mean.
• Letter knowledge: Recognizing and naming letters, with an emphasis on the letters in the child's own name and highly visible letters in the environment.
• Love of books: Wanting to be read to, picking up books independently, and enjoying stories. This motivational factor is underestimated and critically important.

What You Are Doing in the Classroom

Your literacy newsletter should describe specific activities from your classroom and connect them to the skills above. Examples:

• "This week we read five rhyming books and played a game where children had to find something in the room that rhymes with 'cat.' This builds phonological awareness."
• "Children have been writing their names on their artwork every day. Even imperfect letter formation counts and builds the letter knowledge and hand control they will need for writing in kindergarten."
• "We added a word wall this week with words from our current unit. Children are beginning to point to words they recognize outside the classroom."

What Families Can Do at Home

This is the section families are most interested in, and it is worth being specific rather than just saying "read together." Include activities that take under five minutes and fit into existing routines:

• Read aloud for ten to fifteen minutes daily. Ask one specific question about what you read together: "Why do you think she did that?" or "What would you do if you were that character?"
• Play the rhyming game in the car: "I'm thinking of a word that rhymes with 'moon.'"
• Point out letters in the environment when you see them: street signs, cereal boxes, store names.
• Let children see you read. Children who grow up in homes where adults read develop a relationship to books that is genuinely different from children who do not.

Managing Pressure to Teach Reading Early

Some families will ask why their child is not learning to read in preschool, especially if an older sibling or neighbor child started earlier. Your newsletter should be honest: formal reading instruction before children have the phonological and print awareness foundation tends to be frustrating and not more effective than instruction that waits until the foundation is solid. You are building the foundation. Kindergarten will build on it.

Daystage helps you send these kinds of substantive literacy newsletters in a format that is easy to read and share, without requiring families to click through to a separate page or download a file.