Choosing quality children's literature becomes a crucial part of fostering emergent literacy. By selecting quality children's literature, you enable children to be actively involved in stories. When books are used in combination with visual arts, drama, expressive movement and sound making, they can provide additional motivation to become literate and a reason to communicate visually. The expressive arts provide opportunities to reenact favorite books or stories internalizing and interpreting actions of characters in a story. See a selection of children's literature listed at the end of this article.
Children develop skills.
Symbol making and symbol recognition are major building blocks in early childhood. The expressive arts provide numerous opportunities for young children with disabilities to make marks, use gestures, and use spoken and written words, thereby becoming more fluent in their communication skills. A repeated symbol drawn may represent the child's initial self-portrait. Over time, the same symbol may begin to take on more detail and other symbols may begin to represent key features in the child's life, such as family members, a pet, or their name. Creativity, emergent literacy, problem solving, predicting, and sequencing are just a few of the skills developed when children reenact a story, create a graphic image with Kid Pix, or compose a song with creative movements.