Early (Emergent) Literacy Development in School Entrants
Instructional Plan for early literacy development (Phonics and phonemic awareness)
Introductory statement:
Prior to schooling and admission to kindergarten, children encounter a considerable amount of literature within their environments. Their learning skills begin developing way before schooling days. This emergent literacy has been found to determine how quick children can catch up with the learning process once they are enrolled in school (Feldt & Forsyth, 2002). This early literacy has been found to be of great importance, especially to children with learning disabilities (Miller & Foster, 2007). The earliest skills to be developed in learning of the languages include reading, which is later followed by writing.
Course description:
The course is intended to equip children with an ability to read by identifying phonemes through recognition of vowel and consonant sounds. It also aids the children in decoding words and understanding how consonants and vowels are affected in co-articulation when they form different combinations within words. The course is also meant to equip the child with knowledge of words that can enable him to read, spell, decode and categorize words.
Course purpose:
The purpose of the course is to help the child understand the sense of architecture within the English language and the nature of the blocks used in constructing the language. The course is meant to help the child learn how words are synthesized from phonemes as well as understand phonemes within words. The course work should help the child to practically say and hear the phonemes repetitively.
Instructional practices:
The first activity should simply start out by the use of simple cards with vowels and consonants that will be used to teach the child the sounds of various vowels, consonants and their combinations. The teacher should pick up the cards and pronounce the sounds as the child repeats after him/her.
Later, the child’s understanding of the process can be assessed by how well s/he is able to repeat a number of the sounds of vowels and consonants as well as their combinations.
In the second activity the teacher should read out sentences and ask the child to repeat after him/her. This will teach the child through examples on how to recognize and do the correct articulation of various vowels and consonants and how the sequence of the two-consonants and vowels-in a word affect each other in the articulation. This increases the child’s phonological awareness (Jitendra et. Al, 2004).
After this practice the child can be offered sentences to read out loud. These may be the ones already used or news ones. This will help the tutor take an informal assessment on how the child has advanced in decoding and reading words.
In the third activity the teacher should select words or sentences with words that have an almost similar articulation and read them through with the student following through the process. This is meant to help the child differentiate similar sounding words by the order of consonants and vowels.
A similar informal assessment could be carried out by allowing a child to read similar words not presented before without the aid of the teacher in order to gauge the child’s performance.
The fourth activity will consist of practical use of word cards. The teacher should pronounce words in a sentence and ask the child to pick up word cards with those words and align them sequentially as they are pronounced.
This will help improve the child’s ability to recognize words by listening to sounds. The exercise doubles as a means to test the child’s understanding of words.
The fifth activity should involve a similar use of word cards designed to help a child understand how to construct simple sentences by piecing up word cards to form a sentence. The child should be instructed to construct simple sentences such as making requests by piecing up provided word cards. This helps the child relate spoken and written words (Ferreiro, 2002).
The child’s ability to construct such sentences by piecing up the word cards will improve the child’s ability recognize how to order words in a manner that makes sense. The child’s performance in this task may also act as a means to gauge the child’s ability to recognize appropriate word order.
References
Feldt, S. L. and Forsyth, A. R. (2002). Linguistics and Language Learning. Encyclopedia of Education. New York, NY: Macmillan Reference. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Gale
Ferreiro, E. (2002). Intertextuality. Encyclopedia of Education. New York, NY: Macmillan Reference. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Gale.
Jitendra, K. A. et al (2004). Early Reading Instructions for Children with Reading Difficulties: meeting the needs of diverse learners. Journal of Learning Disabilities, volume 37, issue number 5.
Miller, M. and Foster, W.A. (2007). Development of the Literacy Achievement Gap: A longitudinal study of kindergarten through third grade. Journal of Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools volume number 38, issue number3, pp 173-81.
Is this your assignment or some part of it?
We can do it for you! Click to Order!
