By Pat Kordalski, Literacy Specialist

When you think of your kindergarten literacy experiences, what do you remember? Do you remember big story books, learning the alphabet, and learning to form letters? Today’s kindergarten students experience those activities and much more. With so much of the focus in education today placed on literacy, the logical starting place in public school is kindergarten.

A good balanced literacy program in kindergarten consists of several reading and writing components. Teachers read aloud from many different types of books, including fiction, nonfiction, poetry, tall tales, fairy tales, fables, and perhaps biographies, as well as other genres. This allows a teacher to expose children to a large variety of good literature and to model fluent reading.

Remember those big books? Most kindergarten classrooms still use them as a basis for shared reading, an activity that involves the teacher and the children reading a book together as a group. This gives children less experienced with the reading process an opportunity to join in when they feel comfortable and are supported by the teacher and the rest of the children. Children practice reading fluency and apply concepts they are learning – about how print flows left to right and top to bottom, and about how writing is composed of letters, words, and punctuation. They also learn to recognize letters and their sounds, and begin to recognize a few words instantly. We call those words sight words.

By the middle of their kindergarten year, many children are ready to begin more formal reading instruction. At this point, the teacher begins to form guided reading groups. In these small groups, children use small picture books with only a few words on each page to begin to learn some of the strategies they need to become more independent readers. These books help students learn that pictures contain clues for meaning and that the goal of reading is to understand what is read. Lastly, they learn that reading makes sense; in other words, the language in books is similar to the language we speak. Once children can read a few of these little books on their own, they can begin to spend a few minutes each day reading independently.

Children in kindergarten also learn how to write, starting with what is called language experience or shared writing. The teacher writes while the children dictate a story or even a sentence about a picture they have drawn. Proper letter formation is modeled as well as capitalization, punctuation, and how to structure a sentence.

As children learn more letters and sounds, they begin to take over some of the writing in a process known as interactive writing. As a group, the teacher and the children compose a piece of writing together. The children listen for the sounds of the letters in the words and take turns writing. Children have the opportunity to practice forming the letters themselves as they write the letters and words they know. This is a very powerful piece of a kindergarten literacy program because, with the support of the teacher, the result is a piece of writing composed by the children.

Part of the writing program consists of a writers’ workshop, during which the students write sentences or stories, and the teacher conferences with the students to learn more about each student’s strengths and weaknesses as a writer. This helps the teacher design lessons to meet individual student needs.

Finally, the children have the opportunity to practice all they have learned about writing during independent writing time. They may write in a journal or compose their own stories. Many teachers use a combination of writers’ workshop and independent writing to enhance their students’ writing skills.

Kindergarten literacy has come a long way from the days of singing the alphabet song and reading about Dick, Jane, and Sally. Most kindergarten teachers aim to have children leave kindergarten knowing how to read some small books, write a short story consisting of a couple of sentences, and having listened to lots of good literature.

Copy the Story Link