David Castillo edrg3344

Emerging Into Literacy
Chapter 4 - summary


Emergent literacy is about how children learn to read and write. According to this chapter children become readers and writers over time and through (home, school classroom, home, shopping) engagement with multiple opportunities to read and write. It also touches on how children’s written language begins before they come to school. Again, parents or caregivers play an important role in children’s knowledge in learning and writing. How is Emerging Into Literacy further developed?

Fostering Young Children’s Interest in Literacy
Concepts About Written Language – Teachers demonstrate the purposes of written language and provide opportunities for students to experiment with reading and writing by:

-Posting signs in the classroom
-Making a list of classroom rules
-Writing notes to students in the class

-Drawing and writing in journals

I personally feel that today’s teachers and future teachers have the approach of allowing the students experiment with the above opportunities. I reflect to my son’s drawings and writings in his journals, which I have kept since pre-kinder. I don’t recall these types of setting when I was going to school.

Young Children Emerge Into ReadingShared Reading

There are three stages that children move through as they learn to read: emergent reading, beginning reading, and fluent reading. In emergent reading the children have an understanding of the communicative purpose of print. In the reading stage children learn phoneme-grapheme correspondences and begin to decode words. The third stage fluent reading is where children have learned how to read.

Oh, how I wish our primary grade teachers would have shared more readings and perhaps learn to have showed the students the actual pictures of the book. Times have definitely change from twenty years ago, this is so interesting how I can now relate the three stages to my son’s primary-grades.

Young Children Emerge Into Writing

Introducing Young Children to Writing – children become writers before entering kindergarten, others are introduced to writing during their first year of school. As reading development children’s writing development follows the same three stages: emergent writing, beginning writing, and fluent writing. The first stage children make scribbles to represent writing, which appear randomly on a page but in time they begin to scribble from left to right and from top to bottom. In the second stage it signals children’s growing awareness of the alphabetic principle. Children move from writing single words to writing sentences and experiment with capital letters and punctuation marks. Finally, children write in paragraphs and vary their writing according to genre. They use mainly correct spelling and other conventions of written language, including capital letters and punctuation marks.

As stated earlier, how times have change I recall my primary teacher always crossing out my writing. Today’s teachers allow children to experiment with their writing, its part of the stages children move through to become fluent writers. Again, I can apply this to my son’s primary school years. I have kept all his scribbles to pages with letters/words written all over the page and as time went on with experience his writing went form left to right and from top to bottom.