|
| |
 |  | Young children learn through interactions and caring relationships with teachers and family. They readily learn key understandings about literacy-print conventions, vocabulary, story structure, and literacy as a meaning-making process-through daily demonstrations of others engaged in literate activity. This includes traditional storybook reading, as well as forms of literacy like environmental print, media, and technology. Research shows that young children learn parts of language (phonics, grammar, print conventions) while using language in meaningful contexts; they become phonemically aware as they explore sounds in playful ways; they learn and better comprehend text when they have opportunities to bring their experiences with life and other texts to reading experiences. They learn best when others view them as competent and capable, and when what they already know is acknowledged and celebrated. From the NCTE Committee on Early Childhood Issues
|
teaching strategies
Animal Study: From Fiction to Facts
| Students listen to fiction and nonfiction and explore selected Web sites to identify factual information. To complete their exploration, they predict, question, confirm, and record information about one animal. Focuses on ants, and can be adapted.
|
Creating Class Rules: A Beginning to Creating Community
| On the first days of school, students establish yearlong goals and needs for the classroom. These become the guidelines that are used as a foundation for continuous community building.
|
Family Message Journals Teach Purposes for Writing
| By writing messages with varied purposes, students experience that journal writing can serve many purposes, including remembering information; making sense of new ideas; and developing and sharing personal thoughts.
|
Guess What's in the Bag: A Language-based Activity
| This lesson gives students opportunities to interact and play with language and challenges them to develop and use descriptive language when communicating and addresses both speakers and listeners as they make predictions about the items in the bag.
|
Name Talk: Exploring Letter-Sound Knowledge in the Primary Classroom
| Working with name cards, primary students share their letter/sound knowledge in small groups, giving teachers the opportunity to assess knowledge in a meaningful context.
|
|
professional readings
"Ideal Early Learning Community"
| An ideal "learning community" for a preschooler includes family members, provides children a chance to develop their social and physical abilities, builds early literacy and math skills, and is in some way connected to school, says a report from the National Association of Elementary School Principals.
|
Early Childhood Research: Same Books, Different Experience
| How preschool children experience picture books is affected by their mothers' education level and by who is reading to them.
|
What Really Counts in Early Literacy Lessons
|  Barbara Comber examines three children's early experiences of school literacy lessons to consider what makes a difference in their relative success and failure during the first months of school in this Language Arts September 2000 article.
|
Inquiries into Early Literacies
|  Three teacher stories from the January 2003 issue of School Talk highlight the literacy learning of K-1 students whose inquiry-focused instruction helps the students deepen their understanding of how literacy works.
|
Writing in the Early Grades, K-2
| This summary of findings about writers in the early grades provides ideas and resources for families, educators, and policymakers. Downloadable PDF brochure link included.
|
Do You Work with Reading Volunteers?
|  Need advice for parents who visit your classroom to help out? Here are tips on getting started, working with individuals or in small groups, facilitating literature circles, and more in this excerpt from Volunteers Working with Young Readers.
|
Parent's Guide to Literacy for the 21st Century: Pre-K–Grade 5
|  Teacher Janie Hydrick uses everyday language and classroom examples to illustrate key ELA concepts, including oral language, dramatic play, multiage grouping, emergent literacy and environmental print.
|
|
related resources
NCTE Consultants Specializing in Early Literacy
|  NCTE offers several consultants with expertise in early literacy theory and practice. Bring one to your school to help revitalize your early literacy program.
|
Family Message Journals: Teaching Writing through Family Involvement
|  Bursting with the energetic voices of young writers and their families, this book follows the development of emergent and beginning writers as they explore the power and joy of written communication.
|
The Economic Boost of Quality EC Education
| The author of the report, "Exceptional Returns: Economic, Fiscal, and Social Benefits of Investment in Early Childhood Development," finds good early childhood education programs produce at least $3 in benefits for every dollar of investment.
|
Early Literacy
| Funding opportunities for early literacy.
|
Invented Spelling in the News
| Chicago Tribune columnist, Eric Zorn, posted his comments on invented spelling in 1987, and then apologized for his position fifteen years later when his five-year old son began to write. Read both columns, as well as reader commentary.
|
Read Together: Parents and Educators Working Together for Literacy
|  From the NCTE Reading Commission and available both as a position statement and as a poster w/ accompanying brochures. Provides valuable information for anyone who reads with young children, including book lists for different developmental reading levels.
|
Assessing Book Handling Knowledge in Young Readers
| This simple assessment enables teachers to understand what young children know about specific literacy materials, allowing the teacher or family to better plan instruction that builds from their knowledge.
|
Signs of a Good Preschool-K Classroom
| Ten indicators of good classrooms, from the National Association for the Education of Young Children. NAEYC offers an array of information for teachers and families. Visit www. naeyc.org.
|
|
|
|
|
