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Family literacy about building life skills

Family literacy can give children valuable skills long before they reach school age.
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Family Literacy Week in B.C. starts Sunday, and will feature events in communities around the province. Music is this year’s theme.

Family literacy can give children valuable skills long before they reach school age.

“Family literacy promotes early learning in families and the importance of all kinds of different ways of interacting with children,” said Jan Dupuis, a member of the Victoria Literacy Task Group.

“That, of course, includes reading and telling stories, but it also includes — for young children, especially — music.”

Family Literacy Week in B.C. starts Sunday, and will feature events in communities around the province. Music is this year’s theme, Dupuis said.

“Music has a way to promote literacy skills because that involves a great learning process, from learning the names of things to increasing comprehension skills,” she said. “There are also games and nursery rhymes.”

Parents and caregivers are the first and most important teachers that children have, so they have a major role in developing literacy skills, said Jacqueline Taylor, executive director of Decoda Literacy Solutions, a provincial group that supports community-based literacy programs.

She noted that play-based learning is especially useful because it allows children to experiment, observe, listen, make mistakes and try again.

Engaging in various types of play and other activities with children can have great benefits, Dupuis said, including a good range of literacy skills as they enter school.

Input from family feeds a child’s brain, she said. “The brain is just soaking up that new kind of information and creating pathways of learning.”

Even something like baking with a child can build literacy, she said. “You’re looking at how much of each ingredient you’re using, so that’s numeracy.”

Dupuis said a key message is that the activities around family literacy don’t have to involve a great deal of time.

“It doesn’t take a lot to just bring more family literacy activities into your home,” she said.

“You can take 15 minutes at home and sit down and do some singing rhymes with little ones, or read a story.

“It doesn’t have to be a big deal.”

For information on Family Literacy Week events, go to gvpl.ca or decoda.ca.

jwbell@timescolonist.com