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How to build your child’s literacy skills from birth to Grade 2

This page includes tips on how to help build your child’s skills in speaking, listening, reading and writing.

On this page

General tips

Families play a key role in developing a child’s language and literacy skills from birth.

A child’s understanding of the world and their capacity to learn is greatly influenced by how much their family values their literacy skills.

Some important information for parents and carers to consider:

Helping your child to speak and listen

Talking with your child

Regularly talking and interacting with your child extends their language and listening skills and helps grow their confidence with language. You are their primary source of language, so the more you speak and engage with them, the faster they will learn new vocabulary and speak with greater fluency.

Include your child when discussing everyday activities such as grocery shopping, gardening, cooking dinner, collecting mail from the mailbox, doing housework, and travelling in the car or bus.

Outings can also provide a world of new vocabulary. Discussion during outings can enrich your child’s understanding of the world. Outings might include going to the local farmers market, park, zoo, shopping centre, museums, libraries and art galleries.

Other fun activities can include:

Oral storytelling

Storytelling extends your child’s speaking and listening skills, as well as expanding their memory and imagination. You can tell your child stories and encourage your child to tell stories to you.

Storytelling might be about:

Here are some tips to start your storytelling:

Helping your child to read

Supporting your child’s phonics learning

From 2025, all Victorian government schools will be required to teach reading using a phonics-based approach known as systematic synthetic phonics.

Systematic synthetic phonics is a highly effective, evidence-based approach to teaching children how to read by focusing on the relationship between sounds and letters. Children are taught the sounds that letters and letter combinations commonly make and use this knowledge to read and spell words. The approach is systematic, meaning it follows a structured sequence, and synthetic, meaning children learn to ‘sound out’ and blend sounds to read words.

Along with learning letter sounds, children are taught to recognise, blend, segment and manipulate individual sounds in spoken words. These skills are examples of phonological awareness, a critical element in learning to read and write.

Here are some suggestions for supporting your child to develop phonological awareness:

Building on what your child learns at school

There are also lots of things you can do with your child to support phonics learning at home, including games you can play to promote the connection between phonemes (sounds) and graphemes (letters). Keep in mind, though, that games enrich teaching, they do not replace it. They provide the practice that most children need to solidify their recognition of phonics patterns.

Schools may provide students with ‘take home’ decodable readers. These books are specially designed to help beginning readers practice their phonics skills. They contain words that can be sounded out using the letter sound relationships that students have already learned. They build reading confidence and fluency by encouraging children to read independently by using decoding strategies (‘sounding out words’ and blending sounds to read words) rather than guessing from pictures and context.

Reading together

Reading to your child can, and should, start in the first few months after birth. Reading to your child is one of the best things you can do to increase their oral language skills. Even you don’t read often as an adult, or don’t particularly like reading, it is important that you spend this valuable time with your child to stimulate their language development, and to encourage their love of stories and other written genres. Reading together is a valuable thing to do. Reading increases your child’s vocabulary, expands your child’s understanding of the world, introduces them to complex sentence types and gives them confidence when using language. Reading is also an important way to make the link between spoken words and written words.

Here are some general tips:

Helping your child work out difficult words

When your child begins to read to you, they will often have difficulty with long or tricky words. The following strategies will help them develop self-correcting skills and assist with their understanding of the text.

It is important to give your child time to work out difficult words themselves because children can often self-correct if given the time. They read more slowly than we do and need the time to work it out.

Let the child persist a little, prompt by giving a hint such as ‘can you sound out the letters in the word?’

Prompts that may help include:

If the above prompts are not working, you can show your child how to sound out the word or simply say: ‘The word is…’.

An important aspect of learning to read is praising children’s repeated attempts. Praise can be specific, for example, ‘Well done on sounding out that word, you worked out that word by yourself’ or general praise such as ‘You are trying really hard, well done.’

Another good strategy is to ask your child how they worked out the word. This helps reinforce reading strategies they learn from you and from school.

Book chat

Discussing the content and meaning of books is an important part of reading. Chat about the book before, during and after reading, and encourage your child to share their ideas and to ask questions about the book. Making links across the text by asking guiding questions encourages children to think about what they are reading.

Here are some questions you can ask before, during and after reading the book:

Making the most of screen time

You can use the same questions you might ask your child during Book Chat (see above) to discuss TV and other screen programs and games that you watch or play together. Understanding visual media is a key element of your child’s literacy.

There are also a number of great games on the internet to help engage your child in reading. These games include:

Here is a short list of good websites to help begin your online search for games and other resources:

Reading the world together

The world is full of letters and words you and your child can read together.

Activities could include the following:

Helping your child to write

General writing advice

Learning to write begins with scribbling and drawing. This is an important first step and should be encouraged. The next step is to encourage your child to write letter-like shapes, before moving on to practise writing the alphabet – both capitals and lower-case letters. After this, encourage your child to write sentences containing short words.

If your child cannot write yet, you could write for them. Here is a strategy:

Encourage your child to take over some or all of the writing when they feel confident. When your child starts writing, try the following:

Here are some general tips to help your child when writing:

Writing about experiences and interests

You can use your child’s experiences and interests as a springboard into writing.

Topics might include:

Writing creatively

Because creative writing is fun, it is an excellent way to foster a love of writing. It also helps develop your child’s imagination. You can use a book you have recently read together as a source of inspiration or create something new.

Some ideas for writing creatively include:

Opportunities to write every day at home

Like reading, writing with your child should become an everyday activity at home.

Try some of these writing ideas:

Education & training

Updated 26 March 2026

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