Emergent Literacy

I visited a classroom last December that was deep into ex- periencing all the best of what the holidays had to offer. The students were cooking holiday feasts, taste-testing treats, at- tending special performances, listening to music, crafting gifts and watching holiday movies. The teacher apologized that they had put their literacy instruction on hold during that final busy week before winter break. This is a symptom of what I call the ‘kale theory’ of literacy. It’s when we know literacy is important, but we haven’t integrated it into our regular or special activities. This classroom reflected how easy it is to isolate literacy from experience. All those fabulous holiday activities were the per- fect topics to read, write and talk about! The foods we like and do not like, the movies we love, what we see and do: all of these experiences are what we share through language. A focus on lit- eracy as the vehicle to encode those fun experiences into mem- ory could have turned these activities into rich and meaning- ful instruction. This classroom missed the opportunity to make December the richest month for literacy, rather than the most impoverished.] SHOW As we plan rich experiences to teach important concepts, we show our students how they can talk and write about what we are doing. If our students have complex communication needs, then we show them how to do this using their AAC. We demon- strate the use of their AAC, such as how we decide which sym- bols to select to express different messages. AAC needs to be modelled all day, every day. When we want to use a word that is not available in their AAC, then we show our students how we can spell the word with the symbol set of the alphabet. We make AAC personal and meaningful by attributing mean- ing to what our students express. If they smiled and laughed during a performance, then we show them how we can use AAC to say we LIKED it. If they covered their ears and turned away, then we show them how they could complain we did NOT LIKE it. When in doubt, we use AAC to reflect what we see our stu- dents expressing. Students who cannot speak will never have an AAC system that contains every word they might want to use. There are sim- ply too many words in the English language to cram them all into a functional AAC system. This is where the symbol set of the alphabet is the most powerful. We can show our students how to spell the words they are missing. We can demonstrate this whenever we have a message to write. For our most emergent movies we love, what we see and do: all of these experiences are what we share through language. A focus on literacy as the vehicle to encode those fun experiences into memory could have turned these activities into rich and meaningful instruction. This classroom missed the opportunity to make December the richest month for literacy, rather than the most impoverished.

students, we might only show how we identified the first letter in the word we are seeking. We show our students as many let- ters as they will attend to us demonstrating. We make our think- ing visible by sounding out the words and thinking-aloud, such as “I LIKE that! It is FANTASTIC! I hear an F, fantastic!” INVITE We’ve shown our students how they can talk about what we are experiencing. Now we invite our students to respond. They may choose to respond with multi-modal methods such as ges- tures or facial expressions, vocalizations, symbol use or even not at all. We increase the likelihood of a response when we make our invitation as an open-ended comment, such as “I LIKED the performance. I wonder if YOU LIKED it, too.” Now we wait for a response. We look expectant and curious, and we’re prepared to wait as long as 30 seconds. Our emergent students need time to process what is expected, then consider and organize a response. If our students don’t respond, we invite them again, such as by demonstrating another possible comment. “I saw you smile, I think you might have LIKED it.” We wait expectantly again. If the student does not respond to this second invitation, then we move on. If they do respond, then we repeat their re- sponse and elaborate a bit more. For example, if, after our sec- ond invitation, the student smiles and laughs, then we might say “yeah, you LIKED it, too!” Emergent students are still making sense of language expe- riences and literacy tools. They are still learning what their AAC does. They are discovering the joy of engaging, reading and writing. Our goal is not to get a“correct”response, because these students are still learning what language and literacy are all about. Instead, we set goals that our students will accept more invitations to participate, from more people, during more con- texts. We prepare them for this success by showing them ways they can participate and maximizing the opportunities to do so. WRITE Writing is the process of encoding speech as written text. Our emergent students are learning that what we say can be written, and what is written can be read aloud. We make this process ex- plicit by maximizing opportunities for our students to observe us as we generate text. For example, after viewing a performance, we commented that we LIKED the performance and we showed our students they could comment as well. We might have reviewed photo- graphs or video of the performance so that our topic is even more concrete. We invited our student to respond and she smiled and laughed in affirmation. When an emergent student accepts this invitation to respond, it is a tree that fell in the forest and the whole world needs to hear! We now create the opportu- nity for the student to observe us as we write down our co-creat- ed message: “We saw a holiday performance. We liked it!”

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