Home–school literacy bags provide a strong foundation for family involvement at home and at school, they help parents become essential partners in their children’s literacy development. Using home–school literacy bags, children and parents learn how to combine expressive arts and emergent literacy strategies including alphabet recognition, phonemic and phonological awareness, and oral language fluency.

We use all our literacy bags in our setting, as well as sending them home with your child for your child to share with you.

*Encouraging children to engage in literacy learning at home with their families is an excellent way of reinforcing skills learned at Pre-school. Researchers* have shown the use of literacy bags to be highly successful, not just for academic gains but to encourage families to be part of the child’s educational process.

The benefits (according to research

For parents/carers:

• Many parents are not sure how to help their little one learn; these packs have all the resources they need and relate to what their child is learning in the classroom.

• Encourages parents to read aloud with their child. Reading aloud is one of the most important activities for a child to successfully learn to read.

• Over time parents gain ideas to engage their child in literacy learning using their own books or library books. (Or they just use ideas from this blog post!)

For relationships:

• Reading together is a social event

• Positive interactions encourage a love of books and reading and can improve a child’s attitude towards school

For learning:

• Children learn more effectively when information is presented in a variety of ways (called double coding)

• Reading aloud allows children to:

  • learn how books work

  • learn how stories are put together and retell them

  • have discussions about the text and illustrations

  • use new and varied vocabulary (an important predictor of long-term academic success)

• Shared reading allows children to develop:

  • alphabet awareness

  • vocabulary

  • comprehension

  • phonological awareness (how sounds work: syllables, rhyme…)

  • print awareness (pages, covers, reading left to right…)

  • visual and auditory memory

• Additional activities help develop:

  • fine motor skills

  • time management skills and the ability to complete a task

  • writing and drawing skills

  • story sequencing

  • number confidence if the story relates to math as mine shown above does

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