Print Awareness: How We Come To Understand Print As Meaningful

It’s a simple fact, we interpret print every day. It is all around us, touching our lives in both mundane and routine ways, and also in interesting and profound ways. From a simple note to a well-written book affecting us to our core.

Children who cannot yet read, come to understand a stop sign means stop, signs on a shop door or window say if the store is open or closed, stories are made alive by words read on pages in a book, and names on cards determine who gets given the card.

These associations carve an understanding of how combinations of letters form words and hold meaning; that they supply information, drive actions, and are a means of communication. This understanding is called print awareness and it lays a very important foundation for other literacy skills and helps to build children’s interest in printed words, books, and with learning to read, which is another preliteracy skill called print motivation.

For children to be able to develop literacy skills involving reading, spelling, and writing, they first need to have print awareness.

What is Print Awareness?

Print awareness, also referred to as concepts of print, simply means coming to understand that printed text represents spoken language and that there are particular ways of organizing language into print, such as how words are separated by spaces (just as there are brief pauses between words when we speak), using question marks to indicate questions, and how text gets read in a particular direction (which depends on the language and country).

As children develop their print awareness, they begin to internalize how pictures, words, and sentences convey meaning and have real-world applications – that they are a means of communication and a way of learning information.

Print awareness is demonstrated through a collection of skills, many of which we do automatically and don’t even think about as a skill needing to be learned, such as how to hold a book right-side up.

What are Examples of Print Awareness In Action?

The following is a collection of examples of simple, yet important skills that make up what we term print awareness for the English language.

Holding a book right-side up, with letters facing a certain direction
Understanding when a book is upside down and being able to correct the orientation of the book to right-side up
Turning pages in a book from right to left, affecting which is the front of a book versus the back of a book
Starting a book from the front cover
Reading words from top to bottom and from left to right
Attempting to write – if children can’t form letters yet, the only way you may know they are ‘writing’ is when they ask you to read what it says or they tell you what it says
Matching some of the capital letters with lower case letters – beginning to understand how these get called by the same name, even though they often look different from each other
Pointing to a letter and asking what the letter name or sound is
Pointing to printed words or text and asking what it says
Identifying some letter names –may not know all the letters
Asking what a character is saying when seeing words in a speech bubble
Singing the beginning or full alphabet song when you mention the word ‘alphabet’ or string some letters together
Understanding there are letters A-Z, though they may miss many or say many of them out of order
Distinguishing between letters and words, understanding they are distinct entities, and how words can have varying amounts of letters, making some words longer and others shorter
Using print or writing in pretend play – for example, when pretending to be a doctor, asking others (their patients) to fill out a form or answer questions they are ‘reading’ from a blank paper (or paper with some text or scribbles)
Gesturing to signs and familiar labels they know well, possibly telling you what it says. For example, having memorized the name of a familiar grocery store or toy, snack item, or brand

NOTE: Many of these examples are specific to the English language and related languages. Keep in mind in some other countries and languages, book orientation and the direction of reading can be different, such as reading right to left and turning pages of a book from left to right (starting with what would be considered the back of an English book).

Graphics showing examples of syllable and compound word activities available in the bundle.

When Do Children Develop Print Awareness?

Print awareness starts to develop in children in infancy, as they are exposed to language and watch others demonstrate the important role print has in their lives as a way of gaining and recording information, communicating with others, and commanding the actions we choose to take.

Children continue to build their print awareness through early childhood. They experience rapid development of print awareness during the ages 3-5 with exposure to books, oral language development, cognitive and physical development, and engagement with early literacy games and activities.

Examples of Questions and Statements to Build Your Child’s Print Awareness Skills:

Helping your little one develop print awareness can be done through natural everyday life activities you do together. All it takes is being a little intentional with scripting some of your own word awareness, modeling, and sharing them with your child so he/she can make connections between spoken language and written language. Here are some examples to get you started:

Graphics of a mother and son sitting on the kitchen floor putting the produce away in the fridge. Mother's speech bubble reads: Hmmm, what do you think is in this jar? look at this word. It starts with the letter T. Do you think it is tamari, tamarind, or tomato sauce?

Example 2: “Hmmm, I wonder who drew all these pictures in the book. Let’s find the illustrator’s name to find out.”

Example 3: “Let’s look at the back of the book together… look it tells me what the story will be about (or look, here is a picture of the author?”

Example 4: “I wonder how many words this long word has. Rhinoceros… let’s count the letters together, 1…2…3…to 10! The word rhinoceros has 10 letters.”

Example 5: “This book is called Clara Caterpillar. This caterpillar has the same first letter in her name as your name! Clara starts with C and Callie starts with C, and they both make the same /k/ sound, just like in kite, cat, and kangaroo.”

Example 6: “Hmmm, where does this story begin… on this page or over on this page? Can you find the first word for me?”

Example 7: “Who is this package for? Let’s see whose name is on the label/tag… point to the name. Whose name do you think this might be? This name starts with a letter __ , the letter ___ makes a _______ sound, whose name starts with a ________ sound”

Example 8: “Look here, there is a poster with a puppy dog. I see numbers here… 3 numbers…3 more numbers… and 4 numbers … this is a telephone number. Why do you suppose this person put a picture of a dog and wrote their phone number on this poster? …Let’s see what it says.”

By providing opportunities for children to engage with print in meaningful ways and asking prompting questions, you can support your child or student’s print awareness and set them on a path to becoming motivated and successful readers.

Young girl sitting at wooden desk full of colouring and drawing supplies. She is using crayons to draw flowers.

Ways to Encourage Print Awareness:

Drawing children’s attention to words and/or letters throughout the day in fun and meaningful ways
Providing exposure to both capital and lower-case letters in different fonts and sizes
Teaching the alphabet – the best way to work on introducing children to the alphabet is to do activities that combine learning the names of letters with learning the sounds of letters
Reading books together, along with other forms of printed text (cards, signs, flyers, posters, instructions, etc.)
Ensuring print materials like whiteboards and dry-erase markers, paper, pencils, and crayons are readily available
Using letter name puzzles and other letter manipulatives like letter magnets
During pretend play, encouraging connections about the importance and active role print plays in everyday life – servers handing out menus, teachers giving homework, postman giving mail, putting up signage for stores when playing shop, etc.
Hanging alphabet posters, vocabulary-building posters up on walls, creating word walls in classrooms, alongside other ways of creating a rich-language and print-rich environment for children
Pointing out numbers and doing simple counting activities
Creating visuals that model the number of letters in words, such as putting manipulatives under each letter or simply counting out the number of letters in words
Involving children in everyday tasks where print is commonly used, such as writing up a grocery list, doing calendar time, writing birthday cards or other special cards to people, reading or summarizing recipe or craft instructions, reading signs or posters you come across, etc.
Occasionally pointing out letters and letter arrangements, perhaps letters in your child’s name or family member’s names, or drawing your child’s attention to multiples of a letter in a word, such as the letter ‘b’ in the word ‘bubble’.
Labeling things and/or making signs together – this is an especially great way to promote print awareness with children who have additional learning needs such as vision loss (great for promoting braille literacy) and for children with hearing loss.
Playing letter games and doing letter-related activities (again, it is highly recommended to pair these activities with letter-sound recognition tasks to build their phonological awareness skills)

Smiling grandmother and gradfather reading with their kindergarten aged granddaughter.

Tips for Building Print Awareness Skills During Reading Activities:

Point out the author and illustrator’s names on a book, explaining how the person who writes the words you read in a book is called an author and the person who draws the pictures in a book is called an illustrator
From time to time while reading, you might take a quick moment to point out that an exclamation mark means the reader should say the words before it with excitement
Read over favourite stories multiple times and take pauses at certain words, especially at the end of rhyming sentences, to give opportunity for your child to offer up the word as they may have memorized it by heart from hearing it repeated so often
Track the words with a finger as you read a story aloud
Look at a contents page together and track with your finger to find the right page to turn to
Occasionally draw children’s attention to how new sentences start with a capital letter and end with a period, or how you know characters are speaking because of the beginning and ending quotation marks
Occasionally ask if children can find the first word or the last word on a page or in a sentence
Providing opportunities to turn the page of a book while reading
Allow infants to explore books in the best way they know how, by putting them in their mouths – so it is important to provide small board books, cloth books, and plastic books

You can be as creative as you’d like with how you engage your little ones in print awareness development activities and assess what they know and where they are with these skills. Check out an article by Scholastic on Silly Ways to Teach Print Awareness to get some additional ideas.

Key OOliteracy Takeaways

Print awareness refers to understanding and skills surrounding how print is organized to convey meaning and have practical uses and applications in our lives. We read and understand a message in a paragraph because of the punctuation and from knowing where to start reading and in which direction to read the words across the page.
Children begin developing print awareness in infancy and experience exponential learning between ages 3-5 as they learn the difference between words and letters, develop their language abilities, and begin learning to decode words and form letters.
Creating rich-language and rich-print environments for children will promote print awareness, as well as modeling and scripting your own print awareness, helping children make connections with print
The key to helping your little ones with their print awareness skills is to invite your child to be part of everyday tasks and encounters with print, by asking probing questions, reading and writing together, playing literacy-based games, and giving them opportunities to contribute, such as helping with cooking a recipe that follows a recipe, handing out mail, or creating a grocery list together.