There are many essential understandings that students need to have during this early stage of their lives (Tracey & Morrow 2012), and some of these include the make-up of a sentence, the fact that there are spaces in between words because we need to pause when we speak them, that we read (and write) from left to right, and that sentences begin with capital letters. As a first grade teacher, this resonates with me because this is SO much of what I teach my students on a daily basis! If you asked my students, even on just the 15^th day of school, where a capital letter belongs, you’d better believe that almost all of them know the answer because they have heard me say it 1,000 times already! We teach concepts of print to students at a young age so that they can make these connections in their daily lives and be successful with reading, writing, and language in all aspects. 

Some examples of Emergent Literacy can be: 

·      A child playing with letter blocks, 

·      Those magnets on your refrigerator from when you were little – the ones with words on them that you played around with to make sentences that made sense (and sometimes sentences that didn’t!)

·      Board books in a nursery

·      Nursery Rhymes

·      Teaching a child to hold a book right-side-up

Check out the attachment below (you have to open the whole thing to see what I mean - scroll all the way down and click) - but if you are a teacher of the early grades, you have surely seen an assessment similar to this one - concepts of print! Is the student holding the book the right way? Reading from left to right? Does s/he know where to go once the words on the page are finished? Can s/he identify the text vs. the pictures? Children that come from print-rich homes that value literacy are definitely more likely to come to school armed with these concepts - those who don't are the ones who will learn to love reading the more you work with them!

 

            Emergent Literacy is a time in a child’s life when literacy is developing. It is the time between birth and the time when a child is able to perform reading and writing tasks at a conventional level. In most children this is developed by third grade, but some children develop those reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills before that age. Other children are not able to perform those tasks by third grade and some never go beyond the emergent phase in their lifetime.

 According to Morror&Tracey (2017), children who are proficient with listening and speaking tend to excel at early reading and writing. This would mean that the opposite is true. Children who are not proficient with listening and speaking often have delays with reading and writing.  Emergent Literacy Theory also stresses that early literacy begins when a child is being talked to and read to as an enfant. This means that a child’s first teacher is their parent and that literacy truly begins in the home.  

It is very unfortunate the number of children who grow up in homes where literacy is not important. Many children are not read to when they are very small. Since the brain is growing and changing faster in the first three years of life, this would be the most beneficial time to expose children to literature and thus set them up for reading/school success. 

 

I read this on a district website once. It originally came from the U.S. Department of  Education, America Reads Challenge (1999).

 

“If daily reading begins in infancy by the time the child is five years old, he or she has been fed roughly 900 hours of brain food. ‘Reduce that experience to just 30 minutes a week, and the child’s hungry mind loses 770 hours of nursery rhymes, fairy tales, and stories.  “A kindergarten student who has not been read aloud to could enter school with less than 60 hours of literacy nutrition.  ‘No teacher, no matter how talented, can make up for those lost hours of mental nourishment.”

 

In the school where I teach, many children have significant deficits in reading. It is my belief that many parents don’t see the importance of reading to their child or maybe they don’t really know how to read to them in a way to engage them.  All of the students I teach have severe deficits in reading. I assign reading homework over the weekend.  I do this because these children need to be read with and to the most in order to try and fill in those gaps that were left there from earlier years. I actually had a student tell me that his mama said he wasn’t supposed to have homework on the weekends.  I was a little dumbfounded by this.  I know this is not the case will all of the parents of the students I teach. Many do want their children to be successful, but maybe don’t know the best way to go about reading with their child. In thinking about this problem I found a video on youtube that we might need to share with our parents on literacy night.

 A young boy narrates this video.  I thought I would share it with you. You need to copy and paste the link into your browser. I am not sure I know how to embed it, but I will try.  Just in case though here is the link. 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjJD1UDwVKg