Anne Pflaum's List: Early Literacy

• The National Institute for Literacy, “Reading aloud to children has been called the single most important activity for building the knowledge required for success in reading.”

   

• Developmentally Ready

   

  Literacy development begins in the first three years of life, and even babies as young as six weeks old are developmentally ready to begin early literacy activities such as being read to by a caring adult. Knowing when and how babies and toddlers develop literacy skills can help in fostering their development in appropriate ways. Consider that:
•    A baby may wave hands, bat at pages, or show excitement in other ways over pictures in a book – a sign that literacy development is under way.
•     Towards the end of the second year, toddlers will learn 10 or more words per day, however, they understand more than they can articulate. Toddlers pick up on the tone, expression, and body language of the person reading to them, in addition to the words.
• By age three most children understand that pictures represent real items in the world, pick out one book from another by its cover, become aware that words are different from pictures, and may pretend to read.
•   By the end of the first three years of life, a child’s brain will grow to 90 percent of adult size. Reading, talking, singing, and playing helps the brain grow during this critical phase in development.
• The ABC’s of Early Literacy: Three Simple Things You Can Do
• We now know that there are three simple things you can do for babies and toddlers to foster literacy development.
• Read Aloud

• B. Talk

   

  According to the National Research Council in Starting Out Right: A Guide to Promoting Reading Success, “Talk is essential – the more meaningful and substantive the better.”
• Start to point out the names and sounds of letters to toddlers: “Book starts with the letter B.” Then reading, stop and talk about the pictures and words on the page.

• Listen

   

  As much as babies and toddlers need to hear language, they need to practice and imitate sounds and words with interested listeners. Become an important listener with these suggestions:
•    Ask questions to show you are listening and that encourage a child to talk. Listen carefully and acknowledge answers.
•    Listen to children’s questions and take time to answer.
• Simply reading, talking, and listening to a young child in a warm and positive environment at every opportunity are among the most important things you can do for that and every child. The few minutes you spend providing the ABC’s of literacy to a baby or toddler every day has the potential to make an important, positive impact on that child for the rest of his or her life.

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• Development of such scripts comes from children’s actively

  hearing and retelling stories frequently, organizing details, and

  testing hypotheses about outcomes of sequential events

  (Morrow, 1989).
• the basic components of a story: the protagonist, the setting,

  the challenge, the reaction, the consequence, and the moral

  or lesson (Rosenkoetter, 1991
• Children who fail to hear stories regularly

  develop the internal script for stories more slowly, and thus

  they have difficulty making sense of new stories that they

  hear.
• These elements are the

  framework of most stories. The internalized script for a story

  helps children gain meaning from new stories they hear
• hared reading also provides security and calms chil-

  dren’s restl
• Acting out stories, creating original stories, role playing,

  and referring to story characters during everyday activities are

  additional ways to connect prose to daily life
• Modeling and Motivation
• James

  MacDonald of the Ohio State University advises, “play ping

  pong, not darts” (personal communication, 1985)
• Wherever Ricky tries to go ver-

  bally, a loving adult is ahead of him, smoothing the path and

  making his efforts successful. Ricky learns three things: lan-

  guage is fun, he can do it well, and using words gets results —

  all important foundations for early literacy.
• The family’s tools

  for responsiveness are attention, repetition, expansion, and

  affirmation, always keenly following the child’s lead
• Research indicates that by the time children enter kinder-

  garten, most who have been in group care have internali
• encourage parents to use cer-

  tain familiar phrases to cue activities or transitions: “time to

  choose,” “let’s have some lunch,” or “scrub a dub dub.”
• When children draw pictures, their

  verbal comments should regularly be written on the page and

  read aloud.
• Responsiveness

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