"L" is for Literacy: The ABC's of Teaching Preschool

In celebration of 20,000 members of the Teach Preschool Facebook community, Deborah Stewart challenged many of our fellow preschool education bloggers to come up with posts about what they feel are important aspects of teaching preschoolers. The goal is to have a post linked with each letter of the alphabet to make "The ABC's of Teaching Preschool".  

"L" is for Literacy! When most people think of preschool literacy, they often jump right to the ABC song and cute children's books. While those are both important in preschool (I admit, I am quite the children's book aficionado),  I believe in sneaking literacy into the preschool learning environment in every way possible. I do this by providing a very print rich environment and exposing children to reading and writing in a variety of ways.


We participate in the "Morning Message",

dictate our thoughts and observations,

make words by practicing substituting sounds,

we practice writing in the dirt with sticks,

and in flour, salt, sand and shaving cream.

We write chart stories,

and Fairy Tales,

We explore with letters in a variety of ways. These are "magic letters" that show up after you rub a crayon over it!

We learn to put letters together to form our names.

and learn to match uppercase and lowercase letters.

We learn new vocabulary. I'm a firm believer in "Big Words". (After only 3 weeks in school, my students can tell you that the "perimeter" of the rug means "the outside edge". Every time we begin a new unit, we make a vocabulary list as we go along of the "big words" that we are learning.

We learn that our writing has meaning and that we often write for a purpose.

 We even learn to write stories of our own.

And of course, we LOVE to read as many wonderful children's books as we can manage to fit in throughout the day!

Links to the entire "The ABC's of Teaching Preschool" series will appear here as each post becomes available. The bloggers participating are all awesome, I encourage you to check out each and every one! Be sure to stop by Deborah Stewart's blog, Teach Preschool and check out the Teach Preschool community on Facebook for sharing and more links from these and other great early childhood education blogs! 

The ABC’s of Teaching Preschool

A is for Alphabet	B is for Brain Development	C is for Creativity
C is for Color	D is for Dance	E is for Experiment
F is for Fun with Food	F is for Freeplay	G is for Glue
H is for Helping Hands	I is for Imaginative Play	J is for Joy
K is for Kids get Crafty	L is for Library	L is for Literacy
M is for  Memory	M is for Music	N is for Night Light
O is for Outdoors	O is for Outdoor Kitchen	P is for Play
Q is for Quiet Play	R is for Relaxation	S is for Sensory
T is for Transition Tips	U is for Up, up, up!	U is for Understanding
U is for Umbrella	V is for Vehicles	W is for Word Families
X is for the X-Factor	Y is for Yabbies!	Z is for Zoom!