Kids start learning early. In fact, they start learning right when they are in the womb itself, going as far as recognizing their parents' voices, to picking out their music preferences.

While little to no formal education is imparted to toddlers aged 0-5, these are one of the most crucial years for their overall development. In fact, the things learnt and the way they learn these things can go on to impact their entire elementary, middle as well as high school and college experience.

Parents these days are quite proactive about grooming their kids right from the beginning, so as to see to it that they do not miss out on any opportunities. So, joining preschool and doing preschool literacy activities has become the norm, and for good reason. These activities help the kids learn by doing and playing, and are designed in a way that ensures an all-round development. When you engage the child in these activities, it facilitates a structured thinking approach.

They start recognizing patterns, memorizing, making connections, and grasping the concepts more naturally. It also teaches children to work in groups, through collaboration and helps them learn about friendship and team spirit. The benefits go far and wide with studies showing that learning through play fosters creativity, emotional stability, empathy, better vocabulary and language skills, and even influences one’s health, and relationships.

So here we have 5 easy and effective, early literacy activities for preschoolers that you can start enjoying with your child today.

Letter Card Activities

You can use letter card activities and games to teach uppercase and lowercase letters to your kids. While this can be fun and engaging, it is also helpful in training your child’s fine motor skills. Here’s how you can do it.

1. Letter Match - Print out the uppercase and lowercase letters on different sets of card stocks. Say you print lowercase letters on frog card stock and uppercase on lily pad stocks. Now the kids can bring the frogs to their own lily pads corresponding to the matching letter. You can keep a small number of letters initially and then start increasing them as you proceed.

2. Memory Match - The same cards can be put face down for this purpose. As one child picks up the card he/she can say the letter out loud and then proceed to pick another one. If the letters match then both the cards shall remain open, else both the cards need to be turned back. This simple trick also encourages the children to retain memory for longer.

3. Letter Smash - In this game, there are 2 parties. One is the “caller” and the other “smasher”. The caller calls out a letter while also specifying its case (upper or lower) and the smasher has to smash the letter as soon as possible. This game can be played with a partner or with the teacher or parent supervising.

Letter Sounds Alphabet Game

It is important for a child to not only recognize the pattern of letters but also how they sound and an easy way to engage your child in this activity can be through a board game. We all love board games and the same goes for kids too.

So for this activity, you can print out a sheet with letters in a pattern, and keep one game apiece for each child. The children are supposed to roll the dice and move the distance on the board. Once they come to a stop, they must recite the letter and then only allowed to place their game piece on the final spot. Whoever manages to reach the finish line first wins the game.

Letter Matching Activity

This is another fun activity to match the uppercase and lowercase letters and requires the least amount of investment. All you need is a cardboard box, popsicle sticks, a knife, and a marker. Make 26 slits in the cardboard box such that it can fit the popsicle sticks. Now write the alphabets in lowercase above the slits on the cardboard box and stick foam letters in uppercase on the popsicle sticks.

Alternatively, you can write the uppercase letters on the sticks. Now ask the kids to match the two. This game can be made more interesting by hiding the sticks around the house and seeing how fast the kids can find and match all the letters.

Rhyming Activity

Rhyming is one activity that aids the child in learning both reading and writing. While reading can seem like a daunting task in the initial stages, rhyming adds a fun element to it. Moreover, when children are able to observe a pattern and connection between similar sounding words, it also helps them get better at spelling.

You can easily do this activity with the help of clip cards. The card would have one enlarged image with the word describing it and three smaller images. You can ask the child about all the three things and help them recognize how they sound similar or different. Say, you have a picture of a boat, and three small pictures with a moon, a coat, and a banana. You can recite each word aloud and show an association, and encourage the child to do the same.

Sight Word File Folder Game

Once the child is familiar with letters, and sounds, you can proceed to more complex activities like recognizing words. For the early stages, you can start with two to three letter words and then slowly progress. You would need a file folder that has words written on it and some popsicles with the same words pasted on them. In the beginning, you can keep all the words open and once the child recognizes and matches the stick to the word it can be closed. Repeat until all the words on the board are closed.

In conclusion, kids should be trained with these preschool literacy activities as they are not only fun but also very important to provide an edge by facilitating them to learn at their own pace before the beginning of a more formal and structured kindergarten.