Thinking of Literacy in Different Ways

With technology growing and expanding ever more rapidly, children are constantly being bombarded with images, logos, adds, and the list goes on. When thinking of a consumer driven society and children, many negative thoughts or feelings may arise for the parents of these children. One positive way to look at it, is that children are always taking in their environment; what they see, watch, hear, so literacy is practically everywhere! A Google logo, for instance, is probably recognizable to almost any child of a school age year. Granted, there is not an object that goes along with the Google print, but just hearing the word- "Google" is new just to this generation alone! One example in class was a subway logo, print, and a subway napkin. To one child who is not exposed to the internet may think that Google is just a funny sounding word. To another child, the meaning is completely different. Same with the subway napkin! Environmental print awareness is important to children, and important for us as teacher's to be aware that children are observer's of their environment.

Some may question if we are losing some authenticity with the ever growing internet right at our fingertips, especially when some children would rather prefer spending time online or on a computer game then engage in a book. So, one really cool idea brought up in class today, was a take-home literacy pack! The ideas are endless for what teachers can do with this, and it also helps bridge the gap between home and school! The pack usually comes with at least one book, and whatever other materials go along with that planned activity. We learned that children, not only would be enthused about the activity, but spending time with their family doing a small activity can really help engage the learner and become more interested in reading just by spending 5 or 10 minutes with the take-home pack. Imagination can come alive, and spark a child's interest on a subject he or she may not have even been aware of before!

Story Time

Reading aloud to children is not all about knowing what animal noises goes with what animal. No, it's much more than that. Children naturally gravitate towards nice sounds, whether its an emphasis on a certain word, or speaking a word very softly or loudly. There are so many possibilities of how to convey a story to a child when doing read alouds. Not every person are going to read the same story in the same way, and that is the beauty of reading aloud to children. In every situation, there is an opportunity to captivate that child's imagination and in that moment, anything can happen. A giraffe in the book suddenly comes alive in that child's mind and all of a sudden there are so many other things a child can then add to the book. Having the children tell the story in their own way can tell the reader or teacher so much about how a child really interprets the story and what literacy means to the child. Is literacy static? No, it's an ever changing, ever evolving process, that is never dull in a child's mind. Using puppets or animal noises, like most people think, is just scratching the surface of the possibilites of how a teacher can use story time to really engage a child's imagination. It's up to the teacher to really take just a few small steps to really change that dull boring book about the zoo into a book about magical and exciting new places the child will journey too that day in read alouds.

Literacy is Social!

Who knew that there are so many modes and ways of learning through literacy! To expand, movement and sound allow children to express themselves and ideas more thoroughly than they are able to do with talking, drawing or text alone! This was a really fascinating concept to me. I pondered this for some time, and wondered why that is. It made me think of some observations I had made last semester during field experience. During music circle time, we were all singing along with a song about a caterpillar. Then, instantly one little boy lit up and darted over pointing to a picture of a caterpillar on the wall. It was such a bright observation for him to make, that he could barely speak, yet was clearly able to grasp the meaning and connection of the word caterpillar with the picture of one. According to the article, this is a process, or transmediation that the child is accomplishing. Through music, movement, sound, and noise, a child is then able to "walk around in story settings...look at objects from the vantage points of book characters." This is truly fascinating, because not only does the imagination play such a huge role in learning and literacy, but the author then goes on to explain that before writing any language, children can "express their previous knowledge, construct new knowledge, and communicate regardless of their facility with English." Thus, this is a natural process for children, and more importantly has a tremendous affect on how children develop their literacy skills.