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How Does Books and Print Work?

Mar. 07, 2024

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Before a child can read and make meaning from a text, she needs to understand some basic concepts about books and print, also known as book and print awareness. The great thing about these concepts is that they can be integrated naturally as you read aloud to your child.

Today, I want to share just a few simple ways to do this as a part of our Getting Ready for Kindergarten Series.

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Book and Print Awareness

The skills focused on in this post relate to book & print awareness concepts. Check out The Measured Mom’s post from last week, which focused more on teaching basic comprehension skills while reading aloud to your child.

What is Book Awareness?

BOOK AWARENESS includes concepts such as front cover, back cover, title, author, and which way to turn the pages. It even incorporates how we treat books. In my home, I say, “Books are not toys.”

One fun way to introduce book awareness is to place the book you’re reading to your child upside down and pretend to start reading it. If it is a picture book, the pictures will be upside down, which will give your child a big clue.

Does he or she notices it’s upside down? If for some reason she doesn’t, say something like, “Oh my. This book is upside down. I need to turn it the right way before I can read it!”

From the front cover, simply point to the title and read it out loud. Do the same with the author and illustrator. You may just say, “The author wrote the words in the book and the illustrator drew all the pictures.”

Ask your child to help you turn the pages; making sure only one is turned at a time. {If it is a well-loved book, she will know if any pages have been skipped.}

What is Print Awareness?

PRINT AWARENESS includes terms such as: word, letter, sentence, capital letter, & punctuation. These can be confusing terms for many young children and it usually takes lots of exposure to it before print concepts are understood fully.

A simple way to work on concepts of print is by writing the words to a well-loved song on a piece of chart paper.

One of the basics of print awareness is understanding that the pictures and the words are two separate things. If you’ve drawn pictures on your chart paper, point to and identify the picture(s). Say something like, “This is the picture. I can look at the pictures.” Then point to the print. “These are the words. I say the words on the page when I read to you.”

Before you sing the song, find the title together.

As we sing the song, I model how to point to each word. I could even say something like, “When we sing, I’m going to point to each word this time. I love how The Measured Mom has used nursery rhymes to do this, too! She also has FREE concept of print packs! Instead of just using your finger, you can use fun pointers or my kids’ personal favorite, the finger pointer.

Find and frame one word.

When you get to the end of a line, make a big deal that “the words ran out”; but show how you move down to the next line; starting at the left again.

Point out the punctuation. A good starter is the exclamation mark because you can make such a big deal out of it. Read that sentence with some excitement! Let your child echo your expression. Some fantastic books for this are the Elephant & Piggie books by Mo Willems.

Point to the capital letter/uppercase at the beginning of the sentence. Can she find other capital/uppercase letters?

Find interesting words, such as bold print or words that are in all capital letters. {Again, Elephant & Piggie books are perfect for this!}

Once your child knows her letter sounds, tracking the words comes easier as she can use the first letter of each word as a clue. Find a book with little text on each page and point to each word as you read it slowly. Then ask your child to point to the words as you read slowly. This is called tracking or voice to print matching. {Note: When your child knows letter sounds, tracking can be better understood.}