This training is an overview of early literacy for Headstart, Early Childhood, Pre-Kindergarten and Kindergarten teachers. Schools may choose to focus on a specific area of early literacy.
This workshop will explain how to create an environment simulating what happens in the homes of children where books have been a part of their lives since birth. We will look at ways to provide a print rich classroom where reading and writing take place many times every day. An assumption is made that the teachers understand the philosophy behind these areas of early literacy, and rather than explaining and spending a great deal of time on what each category means and why it is important, most of the time will be used to give teachers strategies for teaching their classrooms.
Activities are designed to provide experiences that will lead the child toward becoming a reader and writer. The four areas of literacy covered are listed below:
I. Book and Print Awareness: In this module teachers will examine ways to provide a print rich environment that has a variety of materials for reading and writing. Not only will we discuss materials, but also ways the teacher will model reading and writing in the classroom in many ways throughout the daily schedule. A variety of strategies and activities will help teachers create an environment where students learn about the functions of print and the characteristics of books and other printed materials.
II. Phonemic Awareness: The second module will first examine activities and strategies that give students opportunities to build oral language skills. Students who have not fully developed phonemic awareness must first be able to attend to and produce oral language. Activities and lessons to build the child’s ability to recite rhymes and produce rhyming words are prerequisite skills to the phonemic awareness concepts on the TRPI. Activities to identify beginning and ending sounds, and then to segment and blend phonemes will be included to help the teacher develop their students ability to detect and identify individual sounds within spoken words.
III. Graphophonemic Knowledge: Teachers will be given a variety of activities to help students link phonemes with letters beginning with letter/name recognition and progressing to the sound symbol relationship. This skill will eventually lead to decoding (reading) and encoding (spelling) words.
IV. Listening Comprehension: “Listening comprehension comes before reading comprehension…The listening vocabulary is the reservoir of words that feeds the reading vocabulary pool.” Jim Trelease, The Read Aloud Handbook. In addition to reading aloud and shared reading, teachers will learn many strategies to use to build listening and comprehension skills. Listening to stories and talking about books provide students with positive, pleasurable reading experiences and lead the way to becoming a reader. Listening comprehension is the ability to understand and get meaning from what is read and and can be enhanced through a variety of strategies and activities.
When working with at-risk pre-k and kindergarten students, it is important to think of these students as “inexperienced.” By providing a print-rich, story-rich, book-rich classroom, we can provide the experiences they need to be ready to learn to read in kindergarten and first grade.
Call 806.655.0774 or email Marsha at ConsiderThis@MarshaClements.com
