Hi Sharon,
Please hold strong in your commitment to providing meaningful, relevant literacy experiences for your kindergarteners! Heavy-handed, skills-focused reading instruction too early might prompt higher scores on reading tests but they don't encourage the kind of thinking and motivation that leads to lifelong, joyful readers.
A book that I love and use with my EC teacher candidates, that values and encourages the reading of our youngest learners, is
I Am Reading by Kathy Collins and Matt Glover. "Learn to read," for these authors, doesn't mean being able to parrot all the letter sounds or fill in worksheets. A couple of quotes, just from the introduction: "In the rush toward ever higher reading levels in the early years, we may fail to value the strategy use and high-level thinking children do before they are reading conventionally." And "With regard to early literacy, specifically, we frequently see instruction that is focused on moving young children to the next text levels as fast as possible, and whether children enjoy reading or fall in love with books or develop habits that will benefit them throughout their lives becomes an afterthought, not a priority."
I hope you are able to advocate for your children's needs over elementary administrators who urge developmentally inappropriate literacy practices. Thanks for supporting your children's literacy in real ways!
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Sherry Sanden
Illinois State University
Normal IL
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Original Message:
Sent: 03-25-2019 09:06 AM
From: Sharon Schwartz
Subject: Teaching Reading
The kindergarten classes in our private school have a wonderful, rich Language Arts program which is differentiated for each child. We do not use any type of canned curriculum or workbooks. Instead, the children learn in meaningful, relevant ways and leave kindergarten feeling like real readers and writers. Until now, the benchmark was for children to leave kindergarten with fluent recognition of all upper and lower case letters and the sounds they make, as well as the ability to write stories using invented spelling and basic sight words<g class="gr_ gr_1712 gr-alert gr_gramm gr_inline_cards gr_run_anim Style replaceWithoutSep" id="1712" data-gr-id="1712">.We</g> are aware of common core standards, but they are quite mirky in this area. "Know and apply grade-level phonics and word analysis skills in decoding words".
Year after year, about a third of the <g class="gr_ gr_2650 gr-alert gr_gramm gr_inline_cards gr_run_anim Punctuation only-ins replaceWithoutSep" id="2650" data-gr-id="2650">children</g> leave our kindergarten classes reading fluently, a third on the emergent level, and a third not quite ready yet.
We are under increasing pressure from the elementary school administration to push more children to learn to read in Kindergarten. We are looking for articles and research on this subject.
Thank you
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Sharon Schwartz
NY
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