Early Literacy Tip: Blow Bubbles

What children need to know about reading and writing before they can read or write is called early literacy.

As your child’s caregiver, you are their first teacher. The greatest amount of brain growth occurs between birth and age five, a time your child spends with you. By age three, 85% of the brain’s core structure is formed. As a child ages, the brain gets rid of weaker synaptic connections in favor of stronger ones. We can improve the strength of synaptic connections with experiences that reinforce learning that has already occurred.

In our Building Blocks to Early Literacy series, we will share early literacy tips for you to do at home to help your child get ready to learn to read.

Today’s Early Literacy Tip is simple and fun: Blow bubbles with your child

Other than being a great physical activity you can share with your child, you might wonder how blowing bubbles can help get your child ready to read. Blowing bubbles does several things to prepare your child for their reading journey!

When you blow bubbles at your child they learn to follow the bubbles and track their movement. They will use this eye-tracking skill to follow along with the words on the page when reading lines of text.

When your child blows bubbles at you they are exercising their mouth muscles to help them learn to speak.

Catching and popping the bubbles is more than just fun, it helps improve your child’s fine and gross motor skills. You can also take the opportunity to “label” the bubbles using terms like up, down, high, low, big, small, near or far. Your child can also count the bubbles while popping them, this helps increase their math literacy and early number skills.

So you see, there is a lot more to blowing bubbles than you might realize, but the most important aspect of blowing bubbles is that it is a super-fun way to simply engage in an activity with your child.