Emergent Literacy

1. Emergent Literacy Group 2: Chelsea, Hannah, Sheree, and Elizabeth

2. Emergent Readers are…. • Inventive • Creative • Quick learners • Adaptive • Interested in text, pictures and how they combine to tell a story • Emergent readers are typically pre-school and kindergarten aged children who display curiosity toward reading and writing. They rely on pictures to tell stories, but are becoming more cognizant that print is important as well. Emergent readers have some literacy skills, but are not fluent readers or writers

3. Emergent Readers can… • Recognize some letters and the sounds they make • Rely on memory to “read” a story they’ve heard before • Create stories not told in the book based on pictures, not text • Rely on familiar logos and signs to “read” in the real world.

4. Emergent Readers should… • Work toward letter and sound recognition • Comprehend the idea that stories have beginnings, middles and ends. • Understand that text flows from right to left • Build a mental warehouse of words, phrases, and letters they can use when reading and writing.

5. Current Issues Regarding Instructional Practices

6. Teaching Caregivers is Important • Children learn first in the home environment • Children with more instruction in literacy development at home are more prepared for formal education. • Teaching caregivers important skills to help with emergent literacy development. • Research shows that educating caregivers can make a difference.

7. Dialogic Story-time Pros • Shown to improve emergent literacy skills, such as vocabulary building. • Promotes interests of the child • Requires only book and instruction • Fun way to bond • Can be done in home, in school, and in library

8. Dialogic Story-time Cons • Home life cannot be monitored, so implementing strategies in library and school are important. • Caregivers and educators may not see the importance/difference of dialogic story-time compared with traditional story-time.

9. Education TV Programs: Pros • Supplementing public educational programs has been shown to help children in low-income preschools. • Teachers act as guides to ensure child participation. • Children learn a variety of emergent skills in different formats and are able to build socialization skills through participation.

10. Educational TV Programs: Cons • Most educators are not supportive initially. • Belief that children will not develop social skills. • Belief that children will not learn literacy skills.

11. Phonemic Awareness: Pros • Phonemic segmentation: emphasizes phonemic activities in the context of spelling and reading actual words, thereby engaging the child and showing relevance. • Phonemic segmentation and blending strategy is more effective improving reading ability than instruction in rhyme or vocabulary alone. • Teaching disadvantaged children early will help close the gap.

12. Phonemic Awareness : ConsPersuading Educators • Most federally funded Head Start programs believe that students are not ready for a curriculum of phonemic segmentation, they should wait until kindergarten or first grade. • Most Head Start programs teach vocabulary and rhyming skills only to promote reading development and phonological awareness. • Children learn letter sounds with little more instruction than through songs, games and rhyming.

13. Instructional Strategies • Fingerpointreading: Follow the words with your finger from left to right as you read to your students. • Rereading the story: Have the student “reread” their favorite parts of the book to familiarize themselves with books and encourages them to be independent readers.

14. Instructional Strategies (2) • Guided Reading: With a small group, read through a text making sure to stop frequently to talk about key concepts like: word recognition, phonics, and comprehension. • Functional and Play-related print: Have these items displayed around the room in multiple formats (ex: menus, signs, labels, schedules, etc.) to help students form connections with different letters and letter combinations.

15. Practices for Emergent Readers: • There are many programs that librarians, can implement with emergent readers. • These practices can be used by both school librarians and public, and don’t require much more than a dedicated effort and time.

16. Readers Theatre • Done by allowing the children to read from a story/play aloud and act out what they are reading. • The reading is split up among all the participants making it less stressful on each individual. • The readers are able to associate what they are reading with the things they are acting out. • Reading aloud and repetition help to enforce how the words should sound and the structure of the sentences.

17. Readers Theatre: Example • The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle • Give each of the children a picture/prop of the food eaten by the caterpillar. • Using a caterpillar puppet allow the children to come forward and “feed the caterpillar” while you read the story aloud to them. • The children feel involved and associate the actions they are performing with the book being read to them.

18. Interactive Read Aloud • Allowing the children to go through the book and discuss each picture, prompting them with what they think is happening and why. • Afterwards going through and reading the book aloud, letting them see if they were right about the story and how the words work with the pictures to tell the whole story. • Helps the children understand the correlation between the visual pictures and the text.