Reading with Pre-Schoolers (3-4 years)
Pre-schoolers are increasingly verbal, understanding about 2,000 words or more and using 1,500 or more. In this stage, before school begins, children are developing their emergent literacy knowledge. Emergent literacy is everything a child knows about reading and writing before he or she receives formal literacy instruction. If caregivers have been reading with children since infancy, these children have already been acquiring this kind of knowledge: They know how to hold books the right way up, how to turn pages, that print is read from left to right and that print has meaning. This knowledge is reinforced and refined in pre-school where children will begin to attend more to the role that graphemes (individual letters and letter combinations such as 'b' and 'ch') play in the reading process.
At this stage, they will acquire more knowledge of sound-grapheme correspondences (e.g., /b/ - 'b'), but most reading will be 'logographic' i.e., they will read words as whole units instead of breaking them into individual parts. These will mostly be common words (including the child's own name), or visually distinct words, such as product and business logos, that are frequently encountered in their environment. They will also begin to develop oral language pre-reading skills such as counting syllables, detecting rhymes and identifying the first sound in a word. Pre-schoolers typically do not have a lot of background knowledge to draw on in order to create mental images of what they hear in stories, so picture books continue to be especially helpful for them at this stage.
Types of Books to Choose
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Look for books that reflect your child's growing interests (dinosaurs, castles, fairies), but also read about a wide variety of topics to build his or her general (background) knowledge.
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Continue to choose books that teach important concepts such as letters, numbers and shapes.
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Pre-schoolers like books that reflect not only their real lives, but also fantastic situations.​
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Use books with rhymes (poetry books, nursery rhyme collections) to develop rhyme awareness.
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Choose books that combine rhyme and repetition. These both enhance memory, and increasingly independent pre-schoolers can 'pretend read' the pages of such books. (They are pretend reading if they are not connecting the words they say to individual printed words on the page, but instead using hints such as illustrations to recall whole sentences or pages from memory, as can happen when a book has been re-read to them mutliple times.)
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Look for books with pictures that do a good job of supporting comprehension of vocabulary and overall content.
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Tips for Reading
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When your child expresses an interest in 'reading', allow him or her to join in by completing lines (this works well with rhyming books in which words can be easily remembered or predicted), or reciting content from memory. You can also make reading more interactive using the dialogic reading approach.
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Point out words that rhyme to your child (e.g., 'Listen. These two words rhyme: frog and log. Can you hear how they both end with -og?). You can also ask him or her to detect rhymes by asking whether two or more words rhymes or not.
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To develop awareness of beginning sounds, point out what sound a word begins with as well as words with matching first sounds (e.g., 'Both cat and cup begin with the same sound: /k/.'). Turn this into a game by asking your child to clap or snap his or her fingers when you say a word from a book that begins a certain sound.
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As you read, draw your child's attention to sound-grapheme relationships. Start off with highly reliable graphemes (ones that are associated with only one sound) such as 'b'. It is a better idea to tell your child that a grapheme spells a sound rather than that it has, makes or says a sound. Many graphemes do not 'say' one sound (e.g., 'a' sounds different in bat, baby, ball and grass); rather, we make sounds that we spell using graphemes. Say something along the lines of 'Look. Here's the letter 'b' at the beginning of the word bear. [Point to the letter.] It is spelling the sound /b/. Can you hear it? Bear. /b/. 'b'.'
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Use book-related words such as author and illustrator with your child and discuss what they mean.
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Provide 'glosses' for unfamiliar words. When you encounter a word that you think your child might not know, quickly provide a child-friendly definition (e.g., 'The mole was curious about the world outside his home. Curious means that he wanted to find out more about it.'). This will help to develop your child's receptive vocabulary.
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Your child is developing the ability to discuss a few events in chronological order. Encourage this skill by recounting, or asking your child to recount, the events in a story. Talk about what happened at the beginning, in the middle and at the end.