"The teacher's job is to establish positive relationships with individual children while also helping children to develop positive relationships with one another. These relationships provide children with self-esteem and self-confidence, and a secure base for further exploration. Teachers have daily opportunities to share children's discoveries, introduce them to new areas of experience, and encourage their love of all aspects of literacy."
- Betty S. Bardige, Building Literacy with Love
It is essential to have reciprocal relationships with our students - a learning community is built on support and trust. Teaching through relationships recognizes and celebrates the unique stories of the students and teachers within a classroom community. It is an approach that embraces our individual identities while establishing a sense of place. Teaching and learning are connected in deep and meaningful ways. A community of literary artists develops from this ongoing support and encouragement.
Kindergarten literacy curriculum should include daily opportunities rich with discussion and reflection, speaking and listening, critical thinking and problem solving. The classroom environment should reflect the unique interests of the children as well as their developing questions and theories. While following the workshop model to introduce concepts and promote independence, it is the moments in between that I find to be the most powerful.
It is the moment during morning meeting, when I invite a child to fill in the missing part in a word on our morning message. The child excitedly shares that the word to is in the word today - a word in a word! Only a couple of months ago, this same child knew a handful of letter sounds. Now, they know a growing collection of sight words, and they know that a word can be found within a word.
It is the moment when I ask children to engage in a "find your rhyming match" greeting to start our day together. I observe as the Kindergarteners read their own word and then find the rhyming word to match. They sit close to their peer match and reread together, eager to share their find with their friends. They feel proud. They are excited to sit next to someone new.
It is the moment I pull my chair up alongside a developing reader and listen as they use the strategies I reinforce everyday. They talk about the pictures and how the pictures are a tool to help make their reading stronger. They find and point to the words they know.
The incredible growth of our students is often reflected in these moments. These are the moments we, as educators, should be talking about. The growth of a literary artist should not be measured by a level nor thought of only as conventional reading and writing. Young children are at a critical time in their learning. They are building a foundation for literacy. They are developing language through active speaking and listening, they are learning and applying growing strategies and knowledge, they are practicing letter sounds and manipulating language in playful ways, they are working independently and collaboratively to apply what they know across content areas.
They are building a love of literacy.
The teacher should be thought of as a teacher-researcher. Pulling from essential and critical teaching points, as they weave them together to create a learning environment and curriculum specific to the children they work with. For learning to be meaningful, students must be invested. I see teaching as an interactive process, with the focus being on the individual student as well as the whole community.
For example, following the building of our Fairy Houses, this particular group of Kindergarteners became fascinated by homes and people from around the world. I collected leveled and non-leveled books about diverse homes, communities, and children. Every book we read provided discussion and reflection. Children made connections - through these connections they shared a piece of themselves.
We read books about homes on the screen, large sight words projected for the "word detectives" to find. The children read non-fiction books independently and with their work partner. We referenced the World Map and circled the places we read about. All of our work and learning was connected. During Academic Choice, children had the opportunity to use world map puzzles and build structures similar to the structures they had read about. During Writing Workshop, we wrote teaching books about homes around the world, people, and places.
Through our experiences, the Kindergarteners are consistently engaged in reflective conversations, active questioning and researching, drawing, reading and being read to, building, and playing. Through our experiences, the children are not only building a strong foundation for literacy learning, they are building a love for all essential literacy components.
"In my classroom, children are engaged with language - with talk, books, writing - as one part of a program of active making and doing. Language-related activities should be part of a rich curriculum, not just a means for acquisition of literacy skills. At the Kindergarten level, oral communication is the foremost language need."
- Julie Diamond, Kindergarten
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