Literacy is about understanding and being understood. Literacy learning (reading and writing, growing out of communication, speaking and listening) is rooted in children’s enjoyable experiences from birth of gesture, talk, singing, listening and playing. Children find out about, create and communicate meaning through rhymes, songs, stories, picture books, environmental print and images. Learning about literacy requires all educators to be aware of the literacy possibilities in the everyday play worlds of very young children.
Supporting children on their individual literacy journeys requires high-quality interactions and meaningful literacy experiences that connect to their everyday lives. Adults who listen carefully to children and value the choices they make are able to build on a child’s interests and create enjoyable activities that encourage participation in literacy activities in the school or setting, at home, and in the wider community. Children should have chances to create and share a variety of texts and use different media and materials with their friends, family and other adults. Through play, both indoor and outdoor, children can experiment with signs and symbols, explore rhyme and rhythm, and develop alphabetic and phonetic skills.
The Specific area of Literacy is not time-sensitive in terms of the brain’s biological responsiveness to experiences. The roots of learning in the Specific areas, however, reach back to earliest experiences and it is important to support learning in these important areas from birth. The Specific areas represent crucial shared cultural tools and knowledge, which babies and children engage in as members of the society in which they live.
Many aspects of these areas arise naturally for babies and young children as they make sense of their experiences, such as an awareness of quantity, enjoyment of telling and hearing stories, finding out how things work, rhythm, and movement. Children often begin to represent what they understand with their own actions, marks or words. There are also ways of representing understanding with more formal symbol systems such as numbers, writing and other cultural tools and methods for sharing and recording ideas, as well as large bodies of knowledge to be shared with children.
As adults gradually support children to know about and use these Specific areas, either informally as part of daily life or in planned activities, they give children access to the wide scope of shared cultural and intellectual life in modern society, and skills and knowledge to support them in their future learning.
You can find detailed information about Literacy in the Areas of Learning and Development.