Creating Learning Traditions

This holiday season consider adding some new traditions for your family that will make meaningful memories and strengthen foundations for reading and learning success.

Listen, laugh, learn

• Listen to audio books while you're traveling to visit family, wrapping gifts or cooking for the holidays.
• Lyrics to holiday songs are fun to read and sing together. It is also good fun and good collaborative writing practice to make up your own lyrics to familiar tunes.
• Start a story-telling tradition by revisiting holidays of the past. Old family photographs at holiday gatherings will help prompt stories about your own life and family traditions.

Read, relax, respond

• Put reading and writing skills to practical use. Plan holiday meals by reading cookbooks together, writing the shopping lists and finding the needed items at the store by reading signs and labels. Read the recipe and cook together. During the simmering and baking, kids can write and decorate menus or place cards for special holiday meals.
• Set aside time just for reading. Curl up on the couch together and read aloud an old favorite or check out books about another culture's winter celebrations.
• Work on those letters. Improve writing skills with letters to Santa and writing thank you notes for holiday gifts to relatives and friends.

For more holiday reading, visit:

• www.readingrockets.org/articles/books/c360/

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