Literacy
Literacy includes the skills related to reading, writing, listening, and speaking — the key to understanding and communicating in the world through print and other forms of media. Parents and caregivers help children build a strong literacy foundation by reading together, talking, and making literacy connections with real world experiences.
All children develop at different rates, and your interactions and support will help your child grow no matter where they are along the path to becoming literate. The foundational skills for literacy were developed in relation to the Maine Learning Results for English Language Arts. The Maine DOE celebrates the many languages spoken by families across the state and encourages families to support their children's learning through the language(s) spoken at home — many of these skills are highly transferrable across languages.
- Media: A particular form or system of communication (such as newspapers, radio, or television).
- Grammar: The set of rules that explain how words are used in a language.
- Structure: The way that spoken and written words are arranged and organized.
- Literate: The ability to read and write.
Online texts to read to or with your child:
- International Children's Digital Library
- Unite for Literacy
- Free Children's Stories
- Family Guides — Student Achievement Partners
When children learn what print is and how books work.
When children build more understanding of how letters form words and how to read words.
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Glossary
- Decoding: The ability to correctly use letter-sound relationships within a word to correctly read written words.
- Fluent: The ability to read in a smooth and easy way.
When children move from listening to and discussing stories to reading on their own.
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Glossary
- Reading vocabulary: Words that readers need to know the meaning of to understand the text read.
- Comprehension: Being able to create meaning from what is being read.
- Fluent reading: Ability to read the correct words with a good rate of speed and can change tone of voice to match the meaning of the text.
- Appropriate phrasing of words: Being able to read several words at a time instead of word by word with pauses between each word.
- Dialogue: When characters in a story talk to one another. Fluent readers will change their voices to match the voice of each character.
- Punctuation: The marks (such as periods and commas) in a piece of writing that make its meaning clear and that separate it into sentences and clauses.
When understanding of words and meanings is expanded for children.
Glossary
- Irregular spellings: When a word is spelled in a way that does not follow a regular pattern (e.g., "earth" does not sound like its parts "ear" and "th").
- Generalizations: If readers know how to spell words with a similar pattern, they can apply that understanding to spell or read another word (e.g., knowing "eat" and "seat" to spell "treat").
- Prefixes and Suffixes: Word parts added to the beginning (prefix) or ending (suffix) of a word that change its meaning.
When experiences in listening, speaking, reading, and writing help children develop communication skills using appropriate grammar and structure.
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Glossary
- Phrases: A group of words in a sentence.
- Noun: A word that is the name of something such as a person, animal, place, thing, or idea.
- Verb: A word (such as jump, think, happen, or exist) that expresses an action or an occurrence.
- Pronoun: A word (such as I, he, she, you, it, we, or they) that is used instead of a noun or noun phrase.
- Adjective: A word that describes a noun or a pronoun.
- Grammatically correct: Matching an accepted structure of language in speaking and writing.
- Proper nouns: A word or group of words that is the name of a particular person, place, or thing, usually beginning with a capital letter.
- Possessive: Indicates a belonging to someone or something else.
- Plural: More than one.
- Present tense: A verb tense of something that is happening in the present.
- Participles: A form of a verb used to indicate a past or present action that can also be used like an adjective (e.g., "finishing" and "finished" in "the finishing touches" and "the finished product").
- Quantifying: Explanation of the quantity or amount of something.
When children express ideas and communicate through print as they compose written sentences, stories, and other types of writing.
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