The Joy of Literacy

I've been asked a few questions about teaching literacy. Let me start by saying that I was a Reading Specialist in the public schools for more than a decade of my teaching experience. For me, literacy is embedded in everything! But today, I'll take a quick tour of some of the literacy activities Joy and I have been working on lately.

Prior to a trip to the zoo a couple of months ago, I read this book on bears (to left) to Joy. She loves to be read to, and I read non-fiction as often as fiction. Joy has learned to discern which is which and can tell me that we read non-fiction to get information.

Because Joy was interested in the bear book, I looked for a book at a very easy level for Joy to read aloud to me. I found Bears and Their Cubs, by Linda Tagliaferro. It took Joy about 2 weeks to read it all because I have her read from the beginning and add just one new page each day. Each page has only 1-2 sentences on it, using only 113 different words in the whole book. After learning to read the whole book, I have had her read it about once a week during our "sit-down" school time.

When reading non-fiction, I point out the non-fiction text features to Joy. For example, the table of contents, glossary, and index are all common features in non-fiction. So are captions, photographic illustrations, and headings. By talking about these regularly, Joy is learning to discern what her purpose should be in reading the book. That's very important to becoming a good reader!

Last week, we went to the zoo again! Because of her background knowledge on bears, Joy was very interested in the bear exhibit. And to make it even more exciting, this bear (right) swam in front of Joy and her friend for several minutes. Joy got out her Zoo Sketchbook (a blank book with "Joy at the Zoo" on the cover) and drew the bear. I encouraged her to look closely at the bear's fur and feet, which you can clearly see in her drawing. She wrote "bare" (forgot the line on the a and wrote the e wacky) at the zoo.

The next day, during "sit-down" school time, she wrote this sentence about the bear at the zoo:

The translation is: He swam in the water.  The whole "bear" theme has been going on for a couple of months, and I will continue to use Joy's interest in bears to develop her literacy skills (reading and writing are both important literacy skills and develop in tandem at this early stage, especially).

We do more, though! Joy is working on her sight vocabulary, too. You  know, those words that everyone has to learn how to read. Some of them are NOT phonetic, which means they have to be learned by sight only. Others are just so common that kids need to know them automatically, not by sounding them out. This means, basically, that you have to practice these words... not much fun, right?

 

WRONG! Joy practices with her remote control car...

And with a silly little puppet we call "Sluggy" (after some slugs we found on vacation)!

Sluggy "reads" the words when Joy is holding her. I act all upset when she gets them correct because she's "stealing all my stickers" (which I put on the back when Joy reads them correctly).

When I have Sluggy, Joy holds the words up and Sluggy acts like she doesn't know the harder words... and finally Joy helps her. The easy words, Sluggy just says them correctly and then Joy gets to bemoan giving Sluggy a sticker!  It's all quite silly, which, of course, five year olds love!

Let the silliness begin!