Families and time spent at home always play a significant role in the development and maintenance of a child’s literacy skills. This year, the family and home are a much bigger part of everyone’s life, including our children’s education.

This summer, it’ll be particularly important to engage kids’ literacy development. Luckily, there are so many creative and fun ways to do this beyond just reading. 

Invite your kids to try out some of these activities to keep them busy and learning this summer and beyond: 

• Practice reading aloud to family and pets.
• Spend time in the kitchen reading ingredients, product labels, recipes, and anything else you can find.
• Learn all the words to your favorite song and practice singing along or even doing karaoke.
• Choose a book for the whole family to read and discuss together.
• Listen to a book or story while making art inspired by it.
• Move your body while listening to a story, book, or song.
• Learn your family history, funny stories, and jokes from friends and relatives and practice retelling them.
• Follow instructions for a new skill or craft, and teach a friend or relative how to do it, too.
• Play vocabulary-based board games like Scrabble, Boggle, or Bananagrams.
• Play verbal games like taking turns coming up with rhyming nonsense words or words that start with a certain letter.
• Find a favorite picture or piece of art and practice describing it in detail to a friend or relative.
• Create your own newspaper for your house or keep a journal of your daily experiences.
• Write letters or notes to friends, relatives, neighbors, or even community representatives.
• Listen to a podcast for kids (https://app.kidslisten.org/).
• Learn to type.
• Write your own story, poem, or book, leave it for a while, and then come back to revise and edit.
• Research a topic you’re interested in and teach a friend or relative about it.