Literacy Spot

Literacy Spot #51: Playing With Puppets

December 20, 2011
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Puppets have to be my favourite resource for encouraging the development of oral communication skills. As children play with puppets, they play with language – alternating voices, creating personas, extending vocabulary, and listening to others. As with many imaginary play resources, puppets also provide children with an open-ended platform to play out their knowledge of [...]

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Literacy Spot #50: Instructions

December 12, 2011

When we recently received the Playmobil swimming pool set, Immy and I had a great time working together to assemble it. In fact, Immy is even quite good when it comes to helping with Ikea flat pack assembly! She loves looking at the instructions to see which piece we need next and then matching the [...]

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Literacy Spot #49: Letter Stamps (and Christmas Decorations!)

December 5, 2011
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Most children love to stamp and letter stamps are a great addition to your writing area once your children are interested in exploring and playing with letters. Of course, you aren’t just limited to stamping on paper. Stamping on playdough, salt dough or air dry clay is lots of fun too. I like the challenge [...]

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Literacy Spot #48: Letters to Santa

November 28, 2011
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One of the activities Immy has been excited about this year (for the first time) is writing a letter to Santa so when I heard that my friend Kate over at Picklebums was developing a free printable Christmas letter writing set it seemed like the perfect match Immy has been talking about the gifts she [...]

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Literacy Spot #47: Restaurants, Cafes and Sandwich Bars!

November 21, 2011
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Setting up an imaginative play restaurant, cafe or sandwich bar is a wonderful way to engage children with all forms of literacy – speaking, listening, (pre-) reading and (pre-) writing. Plus it is easy to do at home or at preschool!  In fact, this sandwich shop is the latest invitation to play that I have [...]

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Literacy Spot #46: Visual Schedules

November 14, 2011

Using a weekly schedule tailored to your child’s regular activities not only engages them with a literacy based tool in a purposeful way but also helps children to learn about routine or rhythm and provides them with a visual prop that helps them to be involved with getting organised for the day. Tips for making [...]

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Literacy Spot #45: Take a Reading Road Trip

November 7, 2011
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I am taking a little time offline this week to spend with family and to try and kick the final symptoms of my recent illness.  Fortunately, I have some great blogging friends who have offered to help me out with a series of fabulous guest posts   Today I am pleased to introduce Laura of [...]

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Literacy Spot #44: 5 Tips for Supporting Playful ‘Writers’

October 31, 2011
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Kindergarteners and preschoolers often spontaneously play around with writing. Their interest is usually 90% experimentation and 10% imitation  as they watch you to learn about the place and function of writing within society.  It is not unusual for these early forays into the written language to include a combination of shapes, scribbles and random letters [...]

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