Real Books Foster Reading Success 

To become lifelong readers, students need access to quality literature across a wide range of topics from an early age. From an early age, books are among the best tools to foster pre-reading readiness and instill fundamental reading skills like print conventions, alphabet and phonetic awareness and oral language learners. Essential pre-reading skills include:

1. Vocabulary. Children who are read to frequently have larger vocabularies! So even before they learn to read, exposure to books and print can help improve reading comprehension.  

2. Print Motivation. A love of books and reading can and should start early.  

3. Print Awareness. According to this article from Reading Rockets, “print awareness is a child’s earliest introduction to literacy.”

4. Letter Knowledge. When young children begin recognizing letters, they are on the road to reading success. 

5. Narrative Skills. Reading is about more than simply decoding letters. Young children need to learn how to comprehend what they are reading and be able to understand and tell simple stories. 

6. Phonological Awareness. The individual sounds in spoken words are made up of letters. And while that statement, may sound obvious, it’s something children need to learn. Early reading can help build this awareness.

A pre-K classroom filled with books, and hopefully a robust classroom library, can help build these pre-reading skills from a young age. Fun and engaging titles (especially those filled with repetition and rhyme) are often popular in this age group. 

Enter to Win a Set of Hardcover Picture Books!

We’ve partnered with Scholastic to give away a complete collection of StoryPlay Books—perfect for early childhood classrooms—to two lucky winners. Enter below for your chance to win! Giveaway closes Sunday, January 14th at 11:59 p.m. Only one entry per person, please.

(Please note that we can only ship titles to a school address.)

This giveaway is now closed. Congratulations to our winners!