The Excitement In Early Childhood Literacy

Early childhood literacy development has been one of the most eye-opening areas of study in my pre-service teacher education. The responsibility of assisting young children along the literacy path can be overwhelming at times. Deciding, as an educator, what lessons deserve more time than others and which students need more assistance than others can be a daily struggle; however, being in the classroom and seeing the difference that literacy makes in a young students life is incredible. I imagine the struggles of “perfecting” my craft, as a future educator, will give way to the joys that each day in the classroom will bring. During the brief time that I’ve been in the classroom, I’ve seen primary-aged students turn a corner in regards to their reading ability. In just three months, an English language learner went from struggling with the language to writing me a goodbye letter thanking me for reading Frog and Toad with him. These are the joys that make me want to be in the classroom everyday. Towards the end of my field experience, I started to wonder what I was missing on the days that I was not in my classroom. Who was making a meteoric rise through their leveled books or continuing their path towards fluency in their chapter books. It’s exciting to know that as an educator you can have a direct impact on a young child’s life. This can be a stunning thought at first, but when you see how literacy affects every aspect of your students’ lives, you quickly realize that it’s a responsibility worth having.

The different techniques and literacies that I have learned about this semester are very encouraging going forward. I feel more confident now that even in a strictly structured literacy program, there are opportunities to bring different literacies into the mix. Whether that is print-based, digital, interactive, storytelling, play, etc., the opportunities seem endless; it’s just knowing how to implement those techniques in such a way that you’re furthering your students’ literacy development.

The importance of keeping students engaged cannot be overstated. As is true with any subject, students are not going to learn if they are not intellectually engaged in the activity. As a future educator, I understand the need to truly know your students. By taking the time to know your students, you will be able to connect with them by keeping books in your classroom library that interest them, having props available that they can use to play, or be able to talk to them about things that interest them. These seemingly simple ideas can be the difference between a student with outstanding literacy skills and a child that learns to dislike all aspects of literacy. The responsibility of keeping students engaged in literacy falls squarely on the shoulders of educators. While this might have been a scary thought four months ago, I now find it exciting and ultimately worth the struggle.

What Counts As Literacy In Early Childhood?

In the last ten to fifteen years, the term “literacy” has evolved to encompass a multimodal approach in which children make meaning of the world around them through play, cultural artifacts, and popular media characters. This is in stark contrast to the primarily print-based view of literacy that was widely held until that point. In Aria Razfar and Eunah Yang’s article, Digital, Hybrid, & Multilingual Literacies in Early Childhood, they explore the question “What counts as literacy in early childhood?” While this question can have many answers, Razfar and Yang focus on how electronic and digital media and hybrid languages play major roles in the literacy development of young children.

According to Razfar and Yang, the changing face of literacy can be better understood by taking a sociocultural approach to early childhood literacy development. When looked at it through a sociocultural lens, literacy learning is a social activity and is mediated by signs, symbols, and cultural artifacts. The article explains these semiotic tools that children use to make meaning, such as language, number systems, drawings, signs, hand-held devices, interactive online games, etc. Through these semiotic tools, children learn by engaging in a multimodal method of learning literacy.

Digital mediation is one such way that children see literacy as multimodal. Even in early childhood, interactive cartoons, movies, video games, and music play an important role in the development of literacy. Another type of literacy that Razfar and Yang describe in the article is hybrid mediation. This refers to an intermixing of multiple signs, symbols, and texts. Again, early childhood literacy development has strayed away from being exclusively print-based and more towards a variety of sources.

The availability of such a variety of sources has given children the ability to develop their literacy skills in ways that were not available to previous generations. The multimodal nature of literacy today makes it a necessity for educators to use multiple literacies when teaching students. From interactive games to characters in popular culture, educators now have a plethora of tools to use when helping students further their literacy skills. While this seems like a perfect scenario, multiple literacies can be an overwhelming prospect; however, the more educators can use these literacies in their classroom, the more students will be able to relate to their lives and activate their background knowledge.

Spontaneous Utterances: Are They Helpful?

I recently read an interesting article that examined the correlation between children’s spontaneous utterances during a book reading and their ability to comprehend and retell the story later. Many people, myself included before I began my pre-service teacher training, tend to think that teaching literacy to young children consists only of phonics work in the classroom. While phonics plays an important role in literacy at a young age for students, the ability to retell a story also has a function in their literacy learning.

In her article, The relationship between children’s spontaneous utterances during joint bookreadings and their retellings, Young-Suk Kim documents a study done by herself, Jennifer Y. Kang, and Barbara Alexander Pan. The study consisted of mothers that would read a picturebook to their pre-kindergartner and researchers then documented the utterances by both the mother and her child during the bookreading. The child would then be asked later to retell the story to the researchers. This study piqued my interest because of the fact that other studies have shown that maternal solicitation and interactional styles of children likely influence their interaction during a bookreading; however, the child’s own contribution or ‘child effect’ has seen very little research.

The study found that the more spontaneous utterances a child had during the shared reading, the more likely he/she was to retell the story accurately and with more details. The children that could retell the story with the greatest accuracy usually linked the story to their own lives. This is interesting because it demonstrates how children are not seeing books as a chance to practice vocabulary as much as a chance to make meaning and connect to their background knowledge.

While there were limitations to this study and a need for much more data, it is apparent that children’s interactions during a joint bookreading are extremely important to their comprehension of the story. Parents and educators should acknowledge these utterances and reinforce this type of interaction during joint bookreadings. This study is quite eye-opening for a pre-service educator that is trying to decide how much interaction during a joint bookreading is useful. The answer seems to be as much “on topic” interaction as possible.

The Role of Popular Media In A Literacy Playshop

Working with a primary aged child to create a short film was eye opening for many reasons. After reading about literacy playshops in Karen Wohlwend’s Literacy Playshop: New Literacies, Popular Media, and Play in the Early Childhood Classroom, and in particular the roles that popular media could play in constructing a meaningful literacy experience, I was a bit skeptical. I had chosen to work with a kindergarten student and I clearly brought doubts to the playshop sessions as to what a kindergarten student could gain from this experience. However, I was pleasantly surprised by the vision and structure that Bobby’s story encapsulated. The use of a popular media toy franchise seemed to allow Bobby to focus on his story’s arrangement and not get bogged down in character development. While character development is an important literary device, Bobby’s knowledge of an existing character allowed him to quickly move into storytelling mode. I would hope that as Bobby’s literacy knowledge progresses, he will deal more with character development in future storytelling exercises.

The popular media franchise that I chose to use with my student was Batman. Bobby is obviously a Batman aficionado as I have seen him wearing Batman clothing, I’ve witnessed him playing with Batman toys, and he has told me about the Batman television show. The Batman franchise has been around for some time now; however, each generation seems to bring Batman back in a new and inventive commercial manner. The short film that I produced with Bobby had many elements of the typical Batman story: good vs. evil, technology, physical abilities, and Batman’s continuous need to fight crime.

I began by drawing up a storyboard and a list of characters and settings. Bobby didn’t seem interested in spending much time on the storyboard. He was very anxious to get started with the film. I explained that a storyboard is a great way to keep your ideas in order before you shoot the final film. I don’t believe he completely understood, but he did go along with the activity. His main focus was that he wanted to make sure that I knew his story was a battle between good and evil and that good always wins. After completing the storyboard, Bobby practiced the story a few times while I watched. He was intensely trying to remember what we had spoken about during our storyboarding, but did add a few different elements to the story when it came time to shoot the film. To my surprise, Bobby only needed two takes to film his story. The first take ended with him forgetting to include Batman’s car and he seemed genuinely upset about this. The second take went exactly as he had planned and he seemed very pleased. Also, he was very excited to see the film after we were done. I stopped the video halfway through, thinking that he just wanted to see that I had actually taken film of the story; however, he was not pleased with this and I had to start the video from the beginning and watch it in its entirety.

While Bobby was noticeably borrowing storylines from actual Batman movies or television shows, he did display an understanding of what elements needed to be present for the story to be complete. His story progressed by having a beginning, middle, and end, while expressing to the audience the theme of good vs. evil without using much dialogue or narration. I am very impressed with Bobby’s early literacy skills and am pleased that my skepticism was proven wrong. The literacy playshop definitely deserves a place in the primary classroom.

Maintaining a Healthy Literacy Environment When Adopting Accelerated Reading Programs

The implementation of accelerated reading programs in pre-k and kindergarten classrooms is a direct result of the No Child Left Behind era. It was believed that by employing these programs at such an early age, educators were combating the literacy deficits that plagued some students later in their primary years. In her article Accelerating Reading Inequalities in the Early Years, Mariana Souto-Manning explains that “reading ability is defined by a computer software program and not by a teacher – the child takes a computerized multiple-choice test that claims to assess comprehension.” Another sticking point of the Accelerated Reader program is the methods that must be used to appropriately incorporate the program into the curriculum. Educators must “allocate a minimum amount of time for children to read, forbid them to read outside their level, praise them only when they took the test and received a score of 80% or greater, etc.” It is hard to imagine that this program, or similar programs, has the children’s best interest in mind.

Though her school had adopted the Accelerated Reader program, Souto-Manning describes her classroom’s journey that culminated in finding “wiggle room” in the program. While the program tends to oversimplify reading development, her students found ways to incorporate more meaningful literacy practices into a very structured environment. The best part of the possibilities that Souto-Manning found within the limitations of the Accelerated Reader program is that she worked with her students to find ways that they could still enjoy reading in the classroom. Her students voiced their opinions by deciding that the program limited their book choices and unfairly segmented them into reading level groups. The students also noticed that some students were enjoying privileges that other students would never achieve.

Souto-Manning and her second-grade classroom decided to take action and return some of the freedom that the Accelerated Reader program had taken from them. First they involved parents in fundraising efforts that would be used to purchase books the children actually enjoyed reading. Next, the class removed their Accelerated Reader points from the hallway and decided to keep track of points as a class, so that they could host their own classroom parties as they achieved certain point levels. This created a classroom environment that valued collaboration instead of individualism. Also, Souto-Manning began checking out books from the school library that her students were excited about reading and including them in the classroom library. The Accelerated Reader program did not allow students to check out books that were not on their level, so having all types of levels present in the classroom library was very important for her students.

This article is a prime example of an educator that is invested in the education of her students. She was willing to work with her students to supplement their literacy education tools and turn the classroom into a more inclusive learning environment. This level of compassion is what the education system needs to ensure that our children are not only scoring well on computerized tests, but also truly enjoying their learning experience.