Literacy

By 9 months, most children:

• Attend to their caregiver’s voice when being held and read to
• Become quiet or show pleasure when an adult tells or reads a familiar story or rhyme or sings a familiar song
• Explore books with various senses (sight, touch, even taste)

By 18 months, most children:

• Focus their attention for short periods of time on, and actively participate in, shared reading experiences by pointing to pages, turning pages, and making sounds or saying simple words
• Request that adults read to them
• Point to and make sounds for familiar pictures, objects, and characters in books and photographs
• Make movements and sounds in response to cues in songs and finger plays
• Demonstrate preferences for favorite books

By 24 months, most children:

• Use words, gestures, and/or expressions to request rhymes and rhythm games from adults (e.g., asking an adult by demonstrating part of a rhyme’s movement and combining the movement with words)
• Request adults to read books or certain pages in books to them (e.g., bringing a book to an adult while speaking words of request or making facial expressions that indicate the request)
• Use gestures and body actions to indicate their interest in having a book read (e.g., nodding their head, raising eyebrows, and pointing)
• Prefer to listen to familiar or favorite books multiple times (at a single setting or each day)

By 36 months, most children:

• Actively participate in shared reading experiences by asking questions, making comments, and responding to prompts
• Demonstrate an interest in a variety of early literacy experiences, such as telling and listening to stories, singing and saying rhymes, and engaging with writing materials
• Demonstrate a preference for conventional books over board books
• Enjoy books about a variety of topics
• Choose to look at books, magazines, and other print materials without assistance
• Incorporate books or other print materials into their play
• Recite some words of a familiar book when read to (especially from books with repeating text)
• Recall specific characters or events from familiar stories and retell some parts of a story with prompting and support
• With modeling and support, anticipate what comes next in familiar stories

By 48 months, most children:

• Enjoy and ask to engage in book reading, book writing, or other literacy-related activities
• Explore a variety of literary genres, such as fiction, fantasy, informational texts
• Share opinions about what they did or did not like about a book or story
• With assistance and support, engage in writing activities (e.g., labeling a picture)
• Begin to understand the sequence of a story
• With support, retell or reenact familiar stories with pictures or props as prompts
• Ask and answer questions about main characters or events in a familiar story
• With modeling and support, make predictions about what might happen next in a story and determine if their predictions were confirmed
• With modeling and support, demonstrate knowledge from informational texts
• Respond to the question “what made you think so?” in response to their ideas about books and stories, with more depth and detail

By 60 months, most children:

• Attend to and request longer and more complex books or stories
• Engage in independent writing activities during routine times, such as pretending to write in their own journal
• Demonstrate knowledge of details from familiar stories (e.g., about characters, events, story-related problems, and resolutions)
• Engage in higher-order thinking during shared reading experiences, such as making predictions and inferences, determining cause-and-effect relationships, and summarizing stories
• Retell a familiar story in the proper sequence, including major events and cause-and-effect relationships
• Demonstrate knowledge from informational texts in a variety of ways (e.g., recognizing and naming a plastic model of a Triceratops after being read a book about dinosaurs
• With guidance and support, relate events and information from stories to their own experiences