Literacy, Week 2, Emergent Literacy

Think about classrooms you have visited. What aspects of emergent literacy have you observed in young children? How have you seen teachers support the growth of young children's literacy?

My main placement is in Kindergarten. Some students can make the sounds of certain letters. Others do not even know the names of the letters. Starting on the first day of school, the class meets on the floor for the daily message. The only changes in the message are the dates and the specialist that the students will go to on that day. They focus on how to spell one "sight word" per week; so far, the, to, is. These become no excuse words. Once the class has officially learned the word, the students are expected to spell these words correctly in their journal writing.

Journal writing also began on the first day. The first writing consisted of making particular lines on the page; wavy lines, zig zag, loop de loop, magic lines, and finally A,B,C. On the second day of class the teacher talked about having an idea that she wished to write. She drew a picture of her idea and then wrote "kindergarten writing" using the sounds that the students heard in her statement and magic lines when we had no idea what to write for a particular word. For example, I l t o t ___ p. I like to go to the park. Some students hear a sound in the middle of the word and that is what the teacher encourages them to write on their page. Students then drew their own idea in their journal and wrote their sentence. Some students had only magic lines in their first entry. Three weeks into journal writing, all students were writing at least some letters. Several would write about mom everyday. Dada may be the first words that children say but they learn to spell mom first.