Home literacy activities and their influence on early literacy skills

The relationship between the home environments of 66 children and their language and literacy development was examined. After accounting for child age, parent education, and child ability as indexed by scores on a rapid automatized naming task and Block Design of the WPPSI-R, shared book reading at home made no contribution to the prediction of the literacy skills of letter name and letter sound knowledge in kindergarten. In contrast, home activities involving letters predicted modest and statistically significant amounts of variance. For the areas of receptive vocabulary and phonological sensitivity, neither shared book reading nor letter activities were predictive. Follow-up to mid-Grade 2 underscored the importance of letter name/sound knowledge and phonological sensitivity in kindergarten in accounting for individual differences in later achievement in reading comprehension, phonological spelling, and conventional spelling.