Let 's Begin Reading Right A Developmental Approach to Emergent Literacy

In June 2002, International Reading Association President-elect Lesley Mandel Morrow convened a group of early childhood educators to discuss how the International Reading Association can have an impact on U.S. early childhood programs. "It is expected that early childhood literacy will become a key issue for IRA as the Association seeks to expand its relationships with professionals who are working with young children." The links between early childhood and literacy are strengthening and becoming public knowledge. Politics and policies have embraced early reading, thereby making it the focus of discussion at all levels--national, state, and local--and involving all parties, researchers, practitioners, and parents. Concurrently, professional organizations are becoming increasingly public in their cry for improved practices. What a thrilling time to be working in the field of early literacy! However, we must be especially cautious, as this burgeoning interest in early literacy is not without its risks. Increased emphasis on accountability correlates with intense pressure to raise children's assessment scores. Many of these high-stakes assessments are inappropriate for young children. We fear that teachers will return to didactic instructional methods that have been discouraged for years. These methods are also inappropriate for young literacy learners. Now more than ever, we need to remain firm in our commitment to link what we know about how children learn and our teaching practices. Since its first edition,Let's Begin Reading Righthas focused on how young children construct literacy and the experiences that support its development. We recognize there are naysayers whose voices are many and whose volume is loud. This fifth edition is our response. With it, we continue to spread the word about developmentally appropriate practice. We start by briefly describing children's learning process in general; then we give some detail on how the learning process works with oral language acquisition. We build from that to explain how youngsters come to understand and use written language. This theory base provides the foundation for all our subsequent teaching descriptions and recommendations. We include numerous examples of children's writing as evidence of children's thinking and hypotheses as they progress in their knowledge of written language. Children in preschool through the primary grades are our main focus, though we briefly address the literacy development of infants and toddlers. This book is also designed to help the teacher of young children to understand and validate the importance of play in the child's literacy development. We describe how oral language proficiency and meaningful interaction with print are linked to play. We have made a special point of describing print-rich environments that encourage children to explore functional writing. Developmentally appropriate early childhood education practices are further encouraged through recommendations for providing a variety of experiences and oral language opportunities as part of helping children learn to read and write. Teaching examples illustrate the importance of an authentically integrated curriculum for meaningful involvement in literacy events. In an attempt to dispel the pervasive misconception that isolated drill in skills is better than learning skills in a meaningful context, we carefully explain the development of reading and writing skills within authentic literacy events. Answers to the inevitable questions about teaching phonemic awareness, phonics, and spelling assure the fearful that children are being helped to learn phonemic awareness, phonics, and spelling in the most effective ways. Discussions of reading skills emphasize the necessity of helping youngsters balance their attention to graphophonemic, semantic, and syntactic information when reading. We try to show that this balance is essential foFields, Marjorie Vannoy is the author of 'Let 's Begin Reading Right A Developmental Approach to Emergent Literacy', published 2003 under ISBN 9780130494917 and ISBN 0130494917.