Books are a great source of inspiration for children - they're entertaining, educational, exciting and fun!  Get familiar with all the different types of books that we use and have a session sharing them with your children.  Talk about different books, look a their pictures (or lack of pictures), and talk about what each different sort of books does or helps us with.  See how many different types of book you can find!  Here are a few suggestions:

1. Storybooks: lots of pictures, great stories, ideal for bed time!
2. Recipe books: pictures of food and meals, helps with ideas for cooking.  Yum!
3. Dictionaries: helps us look up words, spell and understand what words mean.
4. Atlases and map books; help us find out where we are or where we're going.
5. Novels: storybooks for adults to read in their spare time with no pictures, thousands of words and hundreds of pages.
6. Colouring books: pages of pictures to colour
7. Non-fiction, factual books: books about history, medical books, how to fix a car or how to care for a baby.

Enjoy looking at all the different books together!

As little ones become more familiar with letters and their sounds and their shapes, encourage them to practice and learn with this simple activity that will help their literacy, writing and sounds...as well as giving them a great sense of achievement.

Take a note book and on each page write a letter, starting from letter 'a' on page one to letter 'z' on page 26 so you end up with a book that runs the whole alphabet from a-z.  Use lower case letters.  If your child is able to write letters themselves, get them to write the letters.

Gather magazines, brochures, family photos, spare stickers anything with pictures on them.  Decide on which page each picture should go on.  For example, a picture of apples on the 'a' page, bananas on the 'b' page.  Fill up the whole book.

Use the book to practice sounds and to look through together naming all the objects in the pictures.