• Characterization
• Colour
• Fantasy
• Surprise
• Repetition
• An example of human courage, cleverness, or grit
• Aesthetic appeal
• Listening pleasure
• A game-like challenge
• Suspense
• Humor or wit
• Hope
• Charm
• Sensitivity
• Realistic dialogue
• Cultural insight
• Nonsense
• Action
• Predictability
• Onomatopoeia ( the naming of thing or action by a vocal imitation of the sound associated with it, as in buzz and hiss )

• Provision of pleasure
• Promoting of creative expression
• Development of imagery
• Nourishment of the imagination
• Presentation and exploration of a variety of styles and forms for the communication of ideas.
• Awareness of functions of languages
• Acquisition of the metalinguistic awareness ( defines as a sense of what printed language is all about )

Read to him/her - lots of different stories, poems and rhymes. Let him see your finger following the text. Ask questions about the story and pictures. Let him join in where possible. Children are never too old to enjoy and benefit from listening to written language.

Talk - and listen to your child, even when the question is one you've heard a million times.

Help your child hold the pencil properly. Sit next to him when you write, not opposite. If he is left handed and you are not, let him see you write with your left hand - otherwise he can't copy what you do. (The opposite also applies).

Praise your child at every opportunity. The more he feels successful, the more he'll want to practice; and the better he'll get.

Don't transfer any worries onto your child. Be relaxed. Have fun!

Don't work when one of you is tired, hungry or bored.

Remember - happy learners learn FAST. Your main aim should be to help your child be happy while learning.

Resource: http://childliteracy.com/tips.html

Pre-reading skills are the skills children need before they can learn to read. Many of these skills are learnt naturally, during the course of a normal childhood and nursery environment. By talking and reading to your child, you will be doing a great deal to develop these essential skills. It does help if you know what you are doing, though, so that you can make the best use of your child's natural inquisitiveness during the pre-school years.
Prereading skills:
Matching - When we read, part of what we do involve matching. Children learn to match shapes, patterns, letters and, finally, words.
Rhyming - Research shows that children who can understand about rhyming words have a head start in learning to read and, even more, to spell.
Letter skills - As well as looking at letters, children need to learn what sounds the letters can make.
Direction - Print goes from left to right. We know that but children need to practice it (especially left-handed children).
Motor skills - Since reading and writing are best taught together, pencil control is important.
Concepts of print - This really means 'how we look at books'. Following print the right way, turning the pages, looking at pictures, 'where are the words...?'
Language skills - The more experience children have of language, the more easily they will learn to read. Your child needs to hear and join in conversations (with adults and children), and listen to stories and poetry of all sorts.

In early writing, we can expect lots of talk to surround writing, since what children are doing is figuring out how to get speech onto paper. Early teaching in composition should also attend to helping children get used to producing language orally, through telling stories, explaining how things work, predicting what will happen, and guessing about why things and people are the way they are. Early writing experiences will include students explaining orally what is in a text, whether it is printed or drawn.
As they grow, writers still need opportunities to talk about what they are writing about, to rehearse the language of their upcoming texts and run ideas by trusted colleagues before taking the risk of committing words to paper. After making a draft, it is often helpful for writers to discuss with peers what they have done, partly in order to get ideas from their peers, partly to see what they, the writers, say when they try to explain their thinking. Writing conferences, wherein student writers talk about their work with a teacher, who can make suggestions or re-orient what the writer is doing, are also very helpful uses of talk in the writing process.
To take advantage of the strong relationships between talk and writing, teachers must minimally understand:
• Ways of setting up and managing student talk in partnerships and groups.
• Ways of establishing a balance between talk and writing in classroom management.
• Ways of organizing the classroom and/or schedule to permit individual teacher-student conferences.
• Strategies for deliberate insertions of opportunities for talk into the writing process: knowing when and how students should talk about their writing.
• Ways of anticipating and solving interpersonal conflicts that arise when students discuss writing.
• Group dynamics in classrooms.
• Relationships -- both similarities and differences -- between oral and literate language.
• The uses of writing in public presentations and the values of students making oral presentations that grow out of and use their writing.

It's important to remember that writing, spelling and reading are all inextricably linked together. Good writers, are good spellers are good readers.

Reading encourages good spelling and writing. When reading, children use their knowledge of letters, sounds, and context to work out what words say.

When writing, children draw on knowledge they have gained from reading - often children will construct a story with a similar structure and storyline to one they have already read. This helps them learn the structure of a story (beginning, middle, end), which kinds of details need to be included in the story (characters, locations, context) and which order it needs to go in (sequence).

Typically young children start writing 'stories' as a single sentence. As the child gains more skills, their stories become increasingly complex.

Writing stories also gives children an opportunity to use their spelling skills in context. Children need to know how to spell using the conventional spelling of words, so that an audience (parent, teacher or other student) can read their work. This alone can be a great incentive for children to get the spelling right.

Watching children develop the skills of learning to write is a fascinating process. In writing sessions I had with my 5 - 8 year olds, I could literally see their minds ticking over with the learning they were experiencing. And to see them realise and understand their achievements, which I would point out to them, was a really special thing to witness.

In the past
It was typical that students would write once a week, on a topic given to them by the teacher, who allowed a certain amount of time for the task to be completed in. The teacher would correct it in red pen and give it back to the student.

Now
In a lot of schools, teachers have replaced the above approach with an exciting and meaningful process. Children are encouraged to develop their own stories, to become authors who express their own ideas and fantasies in their writing. The children then 'publish' their work and present it to the class as something they can be proud of. It's very much a partnership between the teacher and the student.

This information has been sourced from the book "Parents, Teachers, Partners" by Barry Dwyer.