Literacy for Preschoolers: The Blue’s Clues Way
By Dr. Alice Wilder

What is literacy for preschoolers (ages 2-5)? They can’t “read” in the way that adults think of literacy. Yet so much of what a preschooler does everyday involves literacy-related skills.

• Experimenting and making meaning out of everything that they do

•Absorbing new vocabulary words and using them

• Observing and learning sequences of events

• Role-playing

• Understanding and thinking about others’ points of view

At Blue’s Clues, we understand that these sorts of literacy-related skills are important to a child’s future success as a reader. Blue’s Clues has two basic philosophical tenets when it comes to literacy for preschoolers. First, it is essential to expose children to stories, conversations, and the value of books and writing as well as provide a rich and stimulating language environment. Second, children need a balance of whole language and phonics instruction in order to learn to be a reader—one has to want to read in order to sit down with text, and one has to be able to sound out words in order to decode that text.

Every episode of Blue’s Clues includes elements of literacy that model these two basic philosophical tenets.

• Blue’s Clues is a book (take another look at the beginning of the show)

• The Handy Dandy Notebook, a book in which we write down and remember all of our clues

• Looking for Clues demonstrates the logic of problem solving

• Blue’s Favorite thing to do is to read, and so she reads many stories with us

• Mail time encourages writing and telling stories and conveying it to others

• Rhyming—in scripting, we play with words whenever we can

In addition, we have written a number of episodes specifically designed to encourage preschool literacy skills and a love of reading, including:

“Words, Words, Words”: This entire episode is spent with a big bag of words with which we play. There are words all over the house, all visually supported by the object that they represent. Each time a word is pulled out of the bag, the object that word represents appears in front of the viewer, demonstrating the power of words. For example, Blue pulls out the word ‘Lion’ and a lion appears in front of us.

“Blue’s Book Nook”: We are playing Blue’s Clues to figure out what Blue wants to read about. Throughout the episode, Blue and her friends show us that books serve different purposes; some are for information while others are stories that can be interactive. In addition, we help our librarian, Marlee Matlin, find a book in the library.

“Alphabet Train”: In this 26 letter episode, we help Joe and Blue make an alphabet train. Each letter is a box on the train. Throughout the episode, the preschoolers help Blue as she looks for an object that goes in each letter box. To figure it out, we sound out words, match written letters, and “read” words.

Preschoolers are highly literate, but just to be sure that our intended message for Blue’s Clues is being conveyed to preschoolers we test every episode three times during its production by showing it to the preschoolers themselves.#

Dr. Alice Wilder is Director of Research & Development/R&D Producer for Blue’s Clues.