We have sourced some great information from a great website Raising Children, we have some of the advice below. Please follow the link at the end of the story for more information.

Encouraging literacy development

Literacy development is a vital part of your child’s overall development. It’s the foundation for doing well at school, socialising with others, developing independence, managing money and working.

But before your child learns to read and write, he needs to develop the building blocks for literacy – the ability to speak, listen, understand, watch and draw.

And as she gets older, your child also needs to learn about the connection between letters on a page and spoken sounds. For this to happen, she needs plenty of experience with:

• pictures and objects – how you can use words to talk about them
• letters and words – their shapes, sounds and names
• sounds – how words can rhyme, begin and end with the same letters, be broken up into parts like syllables, be formed by blending different sounds and so on.

You can help with all these areas of your child’s early literacy development by:

• communicating with your child
• reading together
• playing with rhyme and other sounds with your child.

And the great news is that you can do this in ways that are fun for both of you.

http://raisingchildren.net.au/articles/developing_literacy.html