After reflecting as a class on meeting with our Kindergarten buddies, I was surprised to see how many different levels of literacy kids can be at, even this early in the year. It was also interesting to see how many different ways kids expressed their understanding of literacy. Working both in my main placement in 4th grade, and in Kindergarten, I have noticed evidence of best practices for literacy in place. In my 4th grade placement, my master teacher spends a significant amount of time during their literacy block giving individualized instruction to students with both their reading and writing strategies. She works with her students individually and in small groups and only focuses on a couple of strategies at each time. After this focus, she checks in periodically over the next couple of weeks to assess student progress on those strategies. Many of the best practices for teaching children in the prealphabetic stage will benefit children. For example, even in 4th grade, my master teacher will give her students opportunities to experience a variety of meaningful texts at different levels. This occurs both on their own and during read alouds. They are also expected to write every day for a variety of purposes. This is experienced both during literacy and at times during social studies, where they will journal about various experiences in the class.
Additionally, during my experience in Kindergarten, I noticed much evidence of best practices for literacy in the classroom. Before even reading Fox’s definitions of best practices, it was obvious that literacy was valued in the classroom. The alphabet was displayed in various places around the room and was also written on a placemat at each student’s desk. She had bulletin boards with word groups on them as well as a place for the letter of the week with words listed that began with that letter. She also had a bulletin board to track each student’s monthly progress through pictures and words. In terms of best practices, I noticed that she taught phonemic awareness through stretching and shrinking words. Students could hear her model this strategy and then were able to copy it in order to hear and identify individual sounds in words. Also, by having one letter of the alphabet as a focus each week, she was able to concentrate on teaching one or two skills at a time.
In working with my Kindergarten buddy, I noticed many elements of emerging literacy. I was surprised by how eager he was to show me everything he knew how to do. When we did our “get to know you” activity, he was able to write the answers for many of his own questions and wanted to write the answers for my questions that he knew how to as well. He was hesitant to make mistakes in his spelling and if he didn’t know how to spell something, he would resort to drawing a picture of the answer. He had a very clear understanding that he was to read left to right, which was obvious when he wanted to spell the name of TV show written on his shirt. Since he was looking at it upside down, he read from left to right as he saw it on his shirt and ended up spelling the word backwards!
When we read together, we read the book, Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, which he was quite familiar with. When I would pause in my reading, he was able to finish the sentence. I wasn’t quite able to tell whether that was because he was so familiar with it or because there were parts he was able to read on his own.
