What Children Need to Succeed in Reading
All children need a print-rich literacy environment, daily opportunities to read and write in meaningful and motivating ways, and ample opportunities for child-initiated and child-directed learning.
Literacy Basics
- A print-rich environment
- Adults who read for their own purposes
- Adults who write for their own purposes
- Frequent story-time experiences
- Information about letter names and sounds
- Shared reading
- Dictation and other shared writing experiences
- High-quality literature
- Contextualized print
- Functional print
- Answers to questions about print
- A rich oral-language environment
- Adult language models
- Adults who listen to children
- Free exploration of oral language
- Peer conversation
- Dramatic play roles
- Experiences for vocabulary enrichment
- Vocabulary information as requested
- Firsthand experiences of interest
- Play
- Daily living
- Field trips
- Nature exploration
- Symbolic representation experiences
- Dramatic play
- Drawing and painting
- Music and dance
- Pressure-free experimentation with writing (independent writing)
- Drawing
- Scribbling
- Prealphabetic writing
- Phonics-based learning
- Pressure-free exploration od reading (independent reading)
- Reading from memory
- Reading with context clues
- Matching print to oral language
- Information about literacy skills
- Left-to-right sequence
- Letter-sound relations
- Checking for meaning
Excerpt from Let's Begin Reading Right: A Developmental Approach to Emergent Literacy, by M.V. Fields & L.A. Groth & K.L. Spangler, 2008 edition, p. 152-153.
© 2008, Allyn & Bacon, an imprint of Pearson Education Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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