Some features of these articles really resonated with me because I do work with young children at a daycare. I do believe that there should be as much literacy and reading as possible during there day at daycare. They are there all day from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. which is such a long time and during this time their knowledge should be expanding. I like how in the article it focused on reading every day with your child. The ratio at daycare is 8 children to 1 teacher, so we have 16 children. It is so important to get them all focused on some sort of reading more than once a day. It should be any sort of reading materials such as just showing them pictures with the word on it, audio books, or just reading to the class. I have found that their attention spans are short so I think that reading one to two books is just enough. Inflection and animation in your voice is very important as well. I think that the teachers at the day care may not need to have a college degree because some of the workers that I work with are very capable and I have seen major gains in the children's reading abilities.
Question to think about:
What are different ways to incorporate literacy in your interactions with young children?
Incorporating literacy with young children is simple and not very time consuming. My favorite example of literacy interactions is hearing mothers spell out groceries/merchandise to their child. Working at Build a Bear, I encountered several mothers who sounded out or spelled out items with their child. Sometimes the spelling would be incorrect, but just the fact that the child is thinking about letters and words in the real world boosts their literary success in the next couple years.
ReplyDeleteI agree that incorporating literacy activities throughout the day is important. Simply having conversations about topics of interest with children can be a literacy activity, then making books about things that interest them can expound on the conversation.
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