With our current "stay at home" mandate, parents are finding themselves wearing many different hats! We are all trying to figure out how to work from home, maintain the home, prepare meals and also teach our children!
I want to begin a series about supporting early literacy at home. Today I'm sharing one of the ways my family encouraged literacy when our boys were younger! Maybe this will spark an idea for you and your family! Please note...I never imagined I would be sharing these pictures with an audience one day! These are not professional!
1. Create a special library of your books!
We turned a closet in our playroom into a little library for our boys! This was an EASY project with a HUGE payoff!
Begin by creating a comfy spot to read! First, I simply took some durable fabric and duct taped (yes, duct tape!) it to their old crib mattresses. You could simply lay that on the floor, or if you have a handy husband, you might convince him to build a raised platform to hold the mattresses. I wanted ours raised so I could have storage underneath.
Next, I took all of our books and had my boys help sort the books by topics (ex: dinosaurs, construction trucks, animals, etc.). I printed out a label for each type of book, including a picture AND the word (ex: picture of a dinosaur with the word 'dinosaurs' under it). I bought some containers from the Dollar Tree, velcroed the labels on and added them to the "shoe shelf" that was already in the closet. The labels were a very important part, don't skip it! It helped my boys know where to find a book and where to put it back!
Y'all, my boys LOVED this space! I would find them quietly reading in there all the time! They even invited their friends inside to read! We called it their library! They would "go to the library" for story time, read in there at bedtime and even invite my husband and me to read in there too!
Other ways to spruce up the space:
1) add lamps or string lights
2)hang the ABCs on the walls
3)keep the paper book covers that sometimes come on hard cover books and hang those book covers on the walls
4)add pillows, stuffed animals, and blankets
5)use bean bags instead of crib mattresses
I hope this inspires you to create a special reading space for your kids!