Emergent Literacy

         In the "Letting Go of the Letter of the Week" article, I found the most important thing to be the outlook and attitudes of the teachers involved in the Reading Initiative movement. It says that they "decided to let go of a deficit model that looks at instruction by identifying what children do not know" and instead they focused on the positives and told the students what they DO already know in order to boost self-confidence and willingness to learn. Donna Bell used an environmental print wall to show her students how much they in fact already knew coming in to their first year of school.

Students learned to look at the first letters of new words and associate those with the first letters of words that they were already familiar with to get a better phonemic understanding of the word! This also creates a much more meaning based learning rather than simply memorizing letters one at a time.

I thought this was such a great idea because we all know how daunting going into Kindergarten can be, so if on the very first day of school a child can get the feeling that they are indeed already smart, it sets the tone for the rest of the year and the child will be much more willing and open to the idea of learning new things. Another way to keep a student's self-esteem up and keep them confident in their abilities is to focus on "editing and revising" instead of simply correcting their work and telling them that they were wrong. This is what Donna Jarvis focused on in her classroom. She allowed the children to "write" in whatever style they knew (drawing, scribbles, words, etc.) and instead of telling them they were wrong and correcting them right away, she told them that every good writer edits their work and made it a positive experience, so as to not turn students away from feeling like they had failed at the task. She also instilled in her students that fact that writing occurs in everyday life through lists, notes, journals, etc. and encouraged her students to write during any given opportunity.




















             The IRA and NAEYC both realize that the most important thing a teacher can do is to recognize the developmental differences in each of their students. Through such things as literacy digs and literacy histories, teachers can better understand the background and environment that each student is coming from, which will give them insight into their developmental stage and give them ideas on how to best adapt their teaching style for each individual student.