Literacy Standard 1 Children gain early reading skills and an appreciation for books by:
Standard 2 Children demonstrate phonological awareness by:
1a. Showing interest in shared reading experiences and engaging with books independently.
2a. Attending to, repeating, and using rhythms, rhymes, phrases, or refrains from stories or songs.
1b. Comprehending meaning from pictures and stories. 1c. Demonstrating an understanding of narrative structure through storytelling/retelling. 1d. Engaging with or asking and answering questions about a book that is read aloud. 1e. Recognizing how books are read (front to back and one page at a time) and recognizing basic features of books such as title, author, and illustrator. 1f. Making connections between stories and real-life experiences.
2b. Demonstrating awareness that spoken language is composed of smaller segments (e.g., words, syllables, and sounds).
Standard 3 Children develop writing skills by: 3a. Recognizing that writing is a way of communicating for a variety of purposes. 3b. Using a combination of drawing, dictating, and writing to tell a story.
Daily Journals Preschool teacher Lynelle uses daily journals to support her children’s emerging writing skills. Daily journals are available for children to access any time during their preschool day. Lynelle also plans more intentional opportunities for the children to write in their journals by providing prompts and a specific journal writing time at least twice a week. Children can choose to share their work with the rest of the class each day by sitting in the “Author’s Chair” during meeting time. At the beginning of the year, children most often draw pictures, with adults writing words. As the year progresses, children begin writing their own letters and word approximations, often accompanied by adult writing. Children decide if they want adult assistance with writing in their journal or not. By the end of the year, many children are independently writing letters and words to describe their drawings. Journals go home when they are full, which for some happens several times a year. Lynelle uses the daily journal as an artifact to document and assess children’s learning and skills, and to share their progress with families. On this day, Dylan was drawing a pumpkin he saw as he was trick-or-treating.
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3c. Communicating through written representations, symbols, and letters using increasingly sophisticated marks.
Standard 4 CHildren gain knowledge of print concepts and the alphabet by: 4a. Identifying letters of the alphabet and producing correct sounds associated with letters. 4b. Developing an understanding that print carries a message through symbols and word.
