Early Literacy Learning

One of the best parts of my job is the opportunity it gives me to get into classrooms and work with students and teachers. Today (well it was when I started this post) I worked with a bunch of new entrants and their teacher and together we became explorers. We were explorers on a mission to find letters from the alphabet in our school environment.
We had fun and found almost every letter!

literacy juniors

View more presentations from rjensen.

I haven’t taught New Entrants before but after working with these guys I challenged myself to think about what I would do next to help them practice and transfer their learning.
This jogged my memory to a quote at a recent national standards hui, “knowing what you are aiming at and then having the signposts is half the battle”.



I had a Draft Literacy Learning Progressions (MOE, 2007) on hand. This document was useful in helping me to plan some further activities and provided me with a reference point for assessing these students’ strengths and needs. Other information I found really useful in this document was related to the cumulative nature of literacy learning and the prerequisite knowledge and skills required for further development.
Prompts re further experiences that would be appropriate for these children, gained from the progressions,included involving children in:
*Identifying letters in their name
*Pointing out the same letter in different places
*Forming letters of the alphabet
*Identify letters by name and match some letters to sound and sound to letters or identify a word that begins with that letter





A quick look online and a chat with colleague Fiona Grant also opened the flood gates for other ideas of learning opportunities that would be suitable for these children:

**Identifying letters from google maps.
**Sparkle Box, resources for teachers
Interactives:
http://www.ictgames.com/literacy.html
http://www.ngfl-cymru.org.uk/vtc/ngfl/ngfl-flash/alphabet-eng/alphabet.htm
http://www.woodlands-junior.kent.sch.uk/interactive/literacy.html#2
Reference Material: http://soundsandwords.tki.org.nz/phonological_awareness/new_entrants_to_year_1


There is some amazing early literacy and ICT work going on out there.
Check out some of these examples:
Manaia Kindergarten Blog: http://manaiakindergarten.blogspot.com/
Helen Rennie-Younger shares how e-learning has been integrated to support inquiry learning in her junior classroom: http://softwareforlearning.wikispaces.com/eStory1
Judi Buckley and Pam Seath from the Waimarino cluster share their ICT, junior class experiences: http://aliveandhumming.wikispaces.com/