Part Two
The Essentials of Early Literacy Instruction:
Practice

Effective early literacy instruction provides preschool children with developmentally appropriate settings, materials, experiences, and social support that encourage early forms of reading and writing to flourish and develop into conventional literacy. These basics can be broken down into eight specific strategies with strong research links to early literacy skills and, in some cases, with later elementary-grade reading achievement.  Note that play has a prominent role in strategies 5, 6, and 8. Linking literacy and play is one of the most effective ways to make literacy activities meaningful and enjoyable for children.

Engage children in rich conversations in large group, small group, and one-to-one settings. When talking with children,

• use rare words—words that children are unlikely to encounter in everyday conversations;

• extend children’s comments into more descriptive, grammatically mature statements;

• discuss cognitively challenging content—topics that are not immediately present, that involve knowledge about the world, or that encourage children to reflect on language as an object;

• listen and respond to what children have to say.

Read aloud to your class once or twice a day, exposing children to numerous enjoyable stories, poems, and information books.  Provide supportive conversations and activities before, during, and after reading.  Repeated reading of favorite books builds familiarity, increasing the likelihood that children will attempt to read those books on their own.

Provide activities that increase children’s awareness of the sounds of language. These activities include playing games and listening to stories, poems, and songs that involve

• rhyme—identifying words that end with the same sound (e.g., Jack and Jill went up the hill);

• alliteration—recognizing when several words begin with the same sound (e.g., Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers);

• sound matching—deciding which of several words begins with a specific sound (e.g., show a child pictures of a bird, a dog, and a cat and ask which one starts with the /d/ sound).

Try to make these activities fun and enjoyable.

Engage children with materials that promote identification of the letters of the alphabet, including

• ABC books

• magnetic letters

• alphabet blocks and puzzles

• alphabet charts

Use direct instruction to teach letter names that have personal meaning to children (“Look, Jennifer’s and Joey’s names both start with the same letter. What is the letter’s name? That’s right, they both start with j”).

Encourage children to attempt to read books and other types of print by providing

• a well-designed library center, stocked with lots of good books;

• repeated readings of favorite books (to familiarize children with books and encourage independent reading);

• functional print linked to class activities (e.g., daily schedules, helper charts, toy shelf labels);

• play-related print (e.g., signs, menus, employee name tags in a restaurant play center).

Encourage children to use emergent forms of writing, such as scribble writing, random letter strings, and invented spelling, by providing

• a writing center stocked with pens, pencils, markers, paper, and book-making materials;

• shared writing demonstrations in which the teacher writes down text dictated by children;

• functional writing opportunities that are connected to class activities (e.g., sign-up sheets for popular centers, library book check-out slips, Do not touch! signs);

• play-related writing materials (e.g., pencils and notepads for taking orders in a restaurant play center).

Read Big Books and other enlargedtexts to children, and point tothe print as it is read. While introducingand reading the text, drawchildren’s attention to basic conceptsof print such as

• the distinction between pictures and print;

• left-to-right, top-to-bottom sequence;

• book concepts (cover, title, page).

Read favorite stories repeatedly, and encourage children to read alongon the parts of the story they remember.

Provide opportunities for children to investigate topics that are of interest to them. The objective is for children to use oral language, reading, and writing to learn about the world. Once a topic has been identified, children can

• listen to the teacher read topic-related information books and look at the books on their own;

• gather data using observation, experiments, interviews, and such;

• use emergent writing to record observations and information; and

• engage in dramatic play to consolidate and express what they have learned.

As a result of such projects, children’s language and literacy skills are advanced, and they gain valuable background knowledge.

After reading the next section, in which the boy lays out a trail of food, the teacher asks, "What do you think the alligator is going to do?”

Finally, after reading the rest of the story, in which the alligator gets trapped in the garage, the teacher points to the note the boy left on the door to the garage and asks, “What do you think the boy wrote in his note?”

Later, the teacher does a follow-up small group activity—to reinforce a sense of story plot, she helps children sequence a few pictures of the main story events.

With the teacher’s help, the children are creating a gas station/garage play center as part of an ongoing unit on transportation.

Next, the teacher helps the children plan the play center.  She asks children about the roles they can play (e.g., gas station attendant, mechanic, customer) and records their ideas on a piece of chart paper. She then asks the children to brainstorm some props that they could use in their center (e.g., signs, cardboard gas pump, oil can, tire pressure gauge) and jots these down on another piece of chart paper.  The children then decide which props they will make in class and which will be brought from home, and the teacher or a child places an m after each make-in-class item and an h after each from home item.

During the next several days, the teacher helps the children construct some of the make-in-class props, such as a sign for the gas station (“Let’s see. . . gas starts with a g. Gary, your name also starts with a g. Can you show us how to write a g? ).

The list of props from home is included in the classroom newsletter and sent to families.

After modeling, the teacher gives the children a small deck of picture cards to sort, providing direct supervision and feedback.