The first day of kindergarten is a momentous occasion for children and families. It’s an exciting milestone that comes with new friends, teachers and learning opportunities.

It can also bring parental anxiety about whether their child is ready, especially when it comes to early literacy. Parents and caregivers can rest assured since they are their child’s first teacher.

Even if a parent isn’t explicitly thinking about what to teach and how to teach it, everyday parent-child interactions foster growth in language and early literacy.

Research shows that early home literacy activities are associated with later reading skills. These activities simply involve talking with your child, describing what you’re doing, asking questions that invite more than a yes or no and following their lead when they say something that interests them.

Below, we highlight five ways parents can incorporate early literacy learning into their everyday interactions this summer.

Sing, rhyme and play with speech sounds

When we sing silly songs, chant rhymes or play with speech sounds by clapping the number of syllables in our names, we’re playing with the sounds of speech.

Through these simple auditory activities, children begin to recognize that spoken words are made up of smaller component parts. Those individual sound parts might be words, syllables or the smallest speech sounds, known as phonemes.

As children notice and manipulate sounds in spoken words, they begin building a foundation for reading and writing. Listening to and singing simple songs, like Down by the Bay or Apples and Bananas by Raffi, allows a child to manipulate sounds in........

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