The purpose of a pre-reading shelf is to get a child’s eyes, ears, and brain ready to read. These activities are primarily for the youngest children in your environment, although many of them can be used, with extensions, for older children as well. How much space you devote to this area depends on how many pre-reading children you have in your class. Keep this area rich while the children need this level of work, and let it shrink naturally as their need for it diminishes.

There are four areas of Language Development: Listening, Speaking, Reading, and Writing. The Pre-reading shelf provides work for children who aren’t yet ready for their Sandpaper Letter sounds. These children are working on Oral Language Development, as well as the three areas of Pre-Reading: Visual Discrimination, Auditory Discrimination, and Concept Development. Your Pre-Reading Shelf should offer activities that grow each of these skill areas.

Before a child begins working with the Sandpaper Letters, they need to spend real time in the pre-reading area. Let’s look at each are more closely.

Oral Language Development

Oral language is really two skills in one: receptive language, what a child takes in through listening, and expressive language, what a child produces through speaking.

Songs, finger plays, poetry, and rhythmic chants all build this skill, whether done as a whole class in a circle or in small groups. Offering a follow-up so children can practice on their own is fun and gives them another opportunity for language development.

A story that comes with a prop, like a puppet, is an especially nice addition to this shelf. You can tell the story a few times at group time, then place it, prop and all, in a basket or on a tray so a child or pair of children can recreate the story, song, or poem themselves at circle time. Older children often tell it to younger ones, which is a lovely way to connect the two. As the year progresses, add the lyrics for the readers in your class.

None of these materials need to stay on the shelf all year. Rotate them with the seasons, just like everything else in this area. And remember, for the 3-6 age group, we want to stay connected to reality rather than fantasy. Save the princesses and dragons for the six to nine plane of development, and keep this shelf grounded in real, everyday experiences.

Specific works you’ll find in this area may include:

• Storytelling props from circle stories
• Puppets
• Felt board songs and patterns
• Poetry cards
• Conversation cards
• Picture Stories
• Miniature environments to set up and discuss in line with thematic studies

Visual Discrimination

Visual discrimination gets a child’s eyes ready to read. This area includes object-to-object matching, object-to-picture matching, picture-to-picture matching, and nomenclature cards.

These works are often introduced to the youngest children in the room, but they’re by no means only for them. Nomenclature cards may also live in your cultural area as part of a unit study. Object-to-object matching can be as simple, or as sophisticated, as you like. Matching the difference between pyrite and quartz, for example, is a fine visual discrimination skill that can challenge even your oldest children.

You can also grow the difficulty of this work over time. A matching card with three different bird stickers can parallel matching a three-letter word like “pat,” while a card with two identical stickers and one different sticker can parallel a word like “pad.” This kind of work is a great addition to your matching shelf for your oldest, most experienced children.

Specific works you’ll find in this area may include:

• Object-to-object matching
• The alphabet roll and movable alphabet letters
• Nomenclature cards
• What is missing?

Auditory Discrimination and Phonemic Awareness

Auditory discrimination trains a child’s ears to discern differences in sound. A newborn hears sound, but it’s just noise at first. Over time, hearing refines, and a child learns to zoom in on sounds and make sense of them. The ultimate goal is for a child to hear the difference between sounds made very similarly in the mouth, like p and b.

This is also where we introduce phonemic awareness, the understanding that words are made up of individual sounds and syllable chunks. A phoneme is the smallest piece of sound within a word. The word “bat,” for example, has three separate phonemes: b, a, and t. Eventually, a child will be able to pull apart the sounds in a word and attach symbols to them, which is essentially what spelling is. That skill starts here, with a child learning to pull words apart and put them back together.

This area isn’t one to rush through. It’s tempting to think of pre-reading as something to get past quickly on the way to “the real work” of letters, sounds, and the movable alphabet, but doing a thorough job here truly makes spelling easier for children later on. We want children to hear sounds in the initial, medial, and ending positions of a word, recognize and generate rhymes, and blend individual sounds back together into whole words.

Specific works you’ll find in this area may include:

• Rhyming with objects or pictures
• Naming the environment
• I Spy
• Sound games (with everyday sounds)

Concept Development

Concept development grows a child’s thinking in preparation for reading comprehension. It includes work like sequencing, go-togethers, opposites, and patterning.

Many of these lessons are shown to the youngest children in the room, but they aren’t only for them. Patterning, for example, holds real value as a math skill well into the elementary years. Sequence stories connect naturally to the movable alphabet and to writing skills, so it’s perfectly appropriate for children to revisit these works as they get older.

Specific works you’ll find in this area may include:

• Sequence stories
• Opposites
• Classification
• Patterning
• Go-togethers

Bringing It All Together on the Shelf

How many activities should you put on this shelf? That depends on the size of your group and the layout of your classroom. This post shows a set-up of 10 pre-reading activities. This classroom didn’t have a built-in shelf, so we improvised with two craft store crates, each with a wire insert, which creates space for 9 or 10 activities. That’s generally plenty.

It is nice to have a variety of containers. I found that the large green tray would only fit on the top shelf! I had to put it there, and I might decide to swap it out for a large basket if I can find one that fits the story props that I plan to put there!

The plan is to rotate these activities regularly to keep up interest and slowly grow the children’s skills as the year progresses. I’ll follow the needs of the children and let the season guide me in the types of materials I offer.

In my own classroom, I was able to devote two shelves to this part of the room. Every activity from the areas above eventually makes its way onto these shelves, though of course they can’t all be out at once.

At the end of the day, this shelf is doing important work. Every match made, rhyme found, and story retold prepares a child’s eyes, ears, and brain for the moment they’re ready to sit down with the Sandpaper Letters and begin to read. Give this area the time and attention it deserves, and that transition will feel like the natural next step it’s meant to be.