Reading with your children is a great place to start their journey to becoming readers themselves. Research shows there are other things you can do that will also help them get ready to read. See the article "Setting the Scene for Literacy" for some suggestions about drawing attention to the text all around us. For a little fun, submit an idea for a title for our upcoming anthology. Happy reading!
We will use this anthology in 2013. Help us name the next one!
Name that Book Contest
Easy to Enter. Fabulous Prizes.
It's time to get your think on! Help us name our newest anthology of books by Maine authors and illustrators. The ninth in our series of anthologies, the collection includes titles by Scott Nash, Amy MacDonald, Lynn Plourde, Toni Buzzeo and Robert McCloskey.
Fabulous prizes: If we choose your title, you'll receive the very first copy of the anthology when it arrives in our hands next year. That's a long time to wait so we'll send you a canvas Raising Readers tote in the meantime. Plus, we'll acknowledge your contribution in the book itself.
Generally, we try to use a title that shows the book is a collection of stories by Maine authors and illustrators for Maine kids. Previous anthology titles to help get your creative juices flowing!
As adults and readers, we encounter text all day every day. In fact, we process text so much we don't even notice it! Think back on your day...what text did you process today? Email? Stop sign? Recipe? Newspaper? Receipt? Help your child notice the print in your environment, and enrich the print in your environment by trying some of these ideas:
Make "book looks" the go-to activity between activities or while waiting for something like a doctor's appointment.
Play "I spy" a word. See what words your child can find in your home. Encourage the hunting even if your child doesn't yet recognize the letters or the word. You're building awareness of print anyway!
Enrich the words in your home by placing labels on common things like "door", "table", "chair", "window", etc.
"Think aloud" about the print you use. Say things like, "I'm going to read this letter," or "I need to read the map to figure out where we are going." This models for your child that using and creating text is something important that big people do...and they can too!
