What is print awareness?
- Print awareness is the ability to recognize that printed language carries messages. Children with print awareness can recognize words on signs and billboards, in books, and in many forms around them.
- Print awareness is also tied to book handling (ability to recognise the author’s and illustrator’s names, titles, table of contents, and page numbers and knowing how to turn pages, how to find the front and back cover of the book, etc.).
Why is print awareness important?
- Children need print awareness in order to understand that written language is related to oral language.
- Performance on print awareness tasks tends to be a reliable predictor for future reading achievement.
- Print awareness and book handling leads to other skills, such as recognizing capital letters, punctuation marks, word boundaries, and word lengths.
How can parents and teachers help their children and students develop print awareness?
- An understanding of print awareness relies on active intervention from adults.
- Parents and teachers can point out letters and words, read to their children regularly, play word games with their children, provide formal reading instruction, etc. to improve this skill.
- Books with predictable and patterned text are also helpful.
For a more detailed description of print awareness, visit the original source listed below. Also, for a list of helpful print awareness activities, visit https://www.readingrockets.org/reading-101-guide-parents/prek/print-awareness-activities-your-pre-k-child
