Chapter 4 Early Literacy Learning

• Children memorize and recite many words that they do not comprehend. To give meaning to these words, children must have language experiences (conversations, read-alouds).
• Phonological Awareness is the ability to pay attention to, identify, and reflect on sound segments including speech soundings, syllables, rhyme, and sense of alliteration.
• Assessing Phonological Awareness-2 sound units related to reading outcomes include a)rhyme awareness and b)individual phoneme awareness.
• By the end of the emergent stage, children should learn to segment onsets (initial consonant sounds) and rimes (the vowel and what follows, such as m-at).
• Alliteration-series of 2+ words beginning with the same sound.
• Alphabet knowledge includes letter naming, sounds, upper and lower case forms, direction, and particular ways of writing a letter. Letter naming is the strongest predictor of reading success. This can be practiced with alphabet games (ex. playing with letters) and matching (ex. match letters with names).
• Emergent readers do not have concept of word in print. Tracking is not automatic, but comes with guidance and practice.
• Tracking activities can include pointing to words, cards/sentence strips, word card matching, and drawing pictures with captions.
• Spoken accounts of children's experiences help connect speech and print. The language experience approach (LEA) allows kids to write about their own experiences (ex. class pets, field trips, playground activities, etc...).
• Assessing COW can be as simple as asking students to point to and identify individual words and the strategies that they use to identify these words.
• Comprehensive Word Study includes five literacy activities: Read To (read new books), Read With (read familiar texts), Write With (model writing), Word Study (direct instruction and phonogical awareness), Talk With (student-teacher book talks).