Pre- literacy skills

Pre-literacy skills are those that little children need before they begin to read and write, for example, drawing curvy and straight lines, sound discrimination, and recognising a few phonemes.

A few early years settings already require children to begin writing in books even before they acquire the correct pencil grip.

I would like to advocate for progressive transition into literacy (writing) for young children.

Air writing, finger painting, threading, cutting with children scissors, beading are a few exercises to help children gain mastery over their fine motor skills.

The goal should be equipping children with skills for flexible wrist movement for handwriting.

Play dough and numbers

Children ages 2-3 can try to roll out playdough to the shape of numbers on a mat.
You can pretend to make a wiggly worm that likes to curl into numbers :)

Learning with dinosuars

Children love dinosaurs! They really make a great classroom theme for  2-3 year olds.
Here are a few ideas that I tried and my kids enjoyed.
1)Dino world off course:
Here we also focused on construction so we added in wooden blocks and logs to let the children build towers and bridges for their dinosaurs.
If you're looking for a short term, easy-to-clean-up set up then this is perfect! We used empty boxes, moss balls, tissue paper, wooden logs and ...voila!

 The children learn about what dinosaurs eat and how they live. I heard all sorts of suggestions, like dinos should eat cars and planes :). Also some said trees and lives. We also created dino eggs and talked about how baby dinosaurs hatch from eggs.

2) Literacy with dino bones: In this activity, we painted hard paper white and cut them into bones. Besides trying to build up a dino skeleton. We thought we would build shape and letter skeletons. Look, someone made an 'A; skeleton!

3) Problem solving; How will Mummy get to baby dinosaur?
 Two dinosaurs separated by a river (you could put a blue cloth to be the river) and two boards. The children need to think about how to get across... In this case, make a bridge.

4) We printed labeled dinosaur pictures and tried to match the plastic ones to the pictures.

What are your fun dino ideas?

Mark making and books

It's never too early to teach your little one to be interested in picture books and making marks.
These are all important parts of pre-literacy.
If you're always writing , then I'm sure your little one has tried to take your pen more than once.
Why not create their own writing area on the floor with paper, colored pencils, coloured markers and a white board!
Let them do as they please!
Always supervise. ..cos everything goes in the mouth! :D
Have magazines and booklets around that you don't mind them ripping pages off (what to do!) And watch them turn the pages with those little fingers...what a perfect way for fine motor skills.
Talk about the pictures with them as this helps develop language.