Live, Love and Learn by Laurie Lind Makin

Author:Laurie Lind Makin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ACER Press

There is a fine line between worrying too much, and so ‘problematising’ a child, and making sure that there is no real problem that needs an expert opinion. The last year of preschool is a good year in which to address any niggling worries that you may have.

Reading

Long before they enter school, if they are given the opportunity, young children are learning a great deal about reading. Many of the things that they are learning can be summed up in a phrase devised by Marie Clay—‘the alphabetic principle’.24 This involves recognition that spoken language can be turned into written language; that written words are made up of letters representing sounds; and that there are systematic relationships between letters and sounds. Obviously, this term refers to reading in English in which the alphabet is used, unlike in several other languages, but the principle has relevance for other languages as well.

Children who have had many early reading experiences have learned:

that what is said can be written down, what is written down can be read and what is written down remains the same from one reading to the next. This permanency of writing and the interrelationship between listening, speaking, reading and writing is a very important concept for young children to develop.

that important people in their lives, in particular, their families, use reading and writing for many activities in their homes and in their communities—relaxation, getting things done, finding things out.

that literacy is enjoyable. If they have been read to from an early age, young children associate reading with cuddles, enjoyment and, increasingly, with information and relationships—learning about things or how to do things or about relationships and feelings.

how to handle books—where to open the book, how to turn the pages, where the book finishes.

the relationship between the illustrations and the text, and how one can help predict the other or can add information.

book language. For example, ‘she shouted/whispered/ exclaimed’. Some children are learning words such as ‘author’, ‘title’, ‘illustrator’, ‘table of contents’.

Children who start school having learned all these things enter with a solid foundation on which to build the more formal encoding and decoding strategies of reading.

The ‘story script’ that was mentioned in the last chapter develops a lot in the preschool years. Your preschooler will continue to be able to choose favourite books, follow a plot and respond to questions. Now they can also speculate about the feelings of the characters, relate characters and situations to their own lives, predict what may happen next and recognise central messages in books.

Many children will have favourite books or sections in books that they know by heart and so can ‘read’, especially if the books contain repeated sequences. The children are not usually decoding printed words (although some preschoolers are able to do this) but rather they are remembering with the help of illustrations and of repeated readings by others. Some children will make the breakthrough into conventional reading somewhere between the ages of three and five, in other words, before they enter school.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.