Chapter 4

VOCABULARY

Environmental Print: Print which can be found EVERYWHERE! Print that surrounds children in their everyday lives, such as traffic signs, restaurant signs, charts, and labels.

Invented Spelling: Spelling children use early in their reading and writing development as they being to associate letters to sounds. More to follow below.

How Writing Develops: Writing develops through exploration and expression of writing themselves.

Scribbling is important
- Early scribbling – Essentially random marks on paper beginning at a young age.
- Controlled scribbling – Scribbling becomes more systematic. Evidence of repeated marks is clear. Children begin to create linear shapes and circles. Symbol creation.
- Scribble Drawing – Moving from symbol creation, more pictographic images are drawn to express writing.

How Reading Develops: Reading develops strongly because of the exposure to print in a child’s everyday life. Seeing print, generally starting at a young age, and witnessing siblings, family, or friends, use print to communicate encourages and promotes curiosity in wanting to learn.

Phases of Literacy Development: Sequence of phases which guides to the development of literacy skills.

Phase 1 – Awareness and Exploration: Pretend reading and scribbling in writing. Curiosity in reading develops because of the exposure to print all over.
Phase 2 – Experimental Reading and Writing: Students have an interest and enjoyment from reading. They are writing letters and the alphabet.
Phase 3 – Early Reading and Writing: Reading is becoming more fluent and writing has grown to be able to compose a short story on their own.
Phase 4 – Transistional Reading and Writing: Students begin to quickly identify words and sounds in words.
Phase 5 – Independent and Productive Reading and Writing: Honing and expanding on their reading and writing skills to reach different audiences and purposes.

Literate Environment: An environment that fosters and nurtures interest in and curiosity about written language and supports children’s efforts to become readers and writers.

Core Language and Literacy Skills: A set of skills required to become successful readers and be efficient at reading and writing.

Oral Language Comprehension
Vocabulary
Alphabet Knowledge
Developmental Writing
Print Knowledge
Developing Early Literacy Skills

Shared Reading: Strategy allowing all children in a classroom or small group to participate in the ready of a story, usually through the use of a big book with large print and illustrations.

Design of Classroom Environment: Creating a classroom environment which is rich in print, print all-around. Not just commercial print, but print that supports the curriculum and can be used as a teaching point. Use the entire classroom for a learning environment. The ideal would be to separate the classroom into four learning areas.

Book Area: Where students know they can retrieve books. Organized by level of difficulty. Accessible by teaching content as well. Comfortable and inviting.
Listening Area: A comfortable, inviting area where students can listen to eBooks using headphones and away from distractions.
Computer Area: Software and online activities which follow the curriculum. Students should have a way to show their computer work.
Writing Area: An area supplied with materials to promote writing. Example: paper, pencils, alphabet chart.

Oral Language Comprehension: Ability to speak and listen with understanding. Includes grammar, work meanings, and listening comprehension.

Vocabulary: The panopoly of words we use, recognize, and response to in meaningful acts of communication. Also using a word chart or incorporating a word wall can benefit the class as a whole.

Phonological Awareness: The ability to hear, recognize, and play with the sounds in our language. It involves hearing the sounds of language apart from meaning.

Alphabet Knowledge: The ability to identify the letters of the alphabet, both lowercase and uppercase letters.

Ask the student to identify uppercase letters one at a time. “What letter is this?”
Do the same with lowercase letters.
Place an “X” next to letters the student identified correctly. Place a dash of other symbol next to the letters the student identified incorrectly.
Assess the letters a few times a year.

Developmental Writing: Beginning with first attempts at spelling word and texts. Young children begin to scribble. It is important in being able communicate through developmental writing.

Print Knowledge: The understanding and recognition of print and how it works. Understanding reading terms, rules, and procedures such as distinction of words, pictures, letters or knowledge of the direction print goes in a book. Important as it motivates learn-to-read process, also marker of literacy experience.

Developing Early Literacy Skills: More to learn in Chapter 5. Routine and practice are essential in the strategies mentioned above.

Language-Experience Stories: First develop a stimuli for the story. Allow the student to dictate the story while the teacher writes it out. This approach allows for the student to orate their story while removing the distraction, or stress, or having to write it out. Afterwards, the teacher and student read the story back. This allows for conversation and dialogue about the story.

Talk about everyday sights and occurrences
Provide problem-solving tasks or highly motivating simulations to elicit oral language
Tell stories through pictures. Wordless picture books are particularly useful for stimulating language development through storytelling and creative writing
Discuss enjoyable occasions
Use visual experiences to stimulate conversation. Visual expression through art activity, in particular, provides exciting oppotunities for language experiences.

VIDEO TAKEAWAYS

Encouraging students to be engaged in their learning by making lessons exciting for them. Like in the video where the students were planning a party and had to write out their own list for the party.
Unconventional spelling is not always a sign of trouble.
Encourage students to spell as soon as they learn spelling sounds and letters. They begin to practice letter-sound connections.
Use invented spelling to coax students to think hard about the sounds in words.
Beneficial to have kindergartners and first graders to sound out words. They sound out and write inventively by using phonemic awareness abilities.
If students are doing it and proud of it, they will be more apt to listen to a lesson that they will benefit from to spell words, they have worked on, correctly.

Using a variety of reading/writing approaches are important.
Make the story interesting by bringing it to life and use character voices to help.
Check for comprehension by asking questions throughout the story.
Create word charts and check students understanding of vocabulary, even ask students to act out the vocabulary words.
Involve students by having the class read along aloud, start with repetitive text and including more and more as you move along.
Have students understand the text to read with expression. When words are bold, the use expression, or in the video example when ellipses are surrounding text, the student understands that is the character speaking.
Shared reading is the soul, the heartbeat of the reading program.

OTHER RESOURCES