Book Club Discussion #2-Kindergarten Literacy Chapters 4 and 5

Heather and I discussed Chapters 4 and 5 in Dr. Anne’s Kindergarten Literacy book this week.  As Chapter 4 is titled, “What Counts as Progress?” was our first topic.  You must “know a child to teach the child”.  The gap between “literacy-rich” and “literacy-deprived” kids begins to widen as they begin reading and writing.  As teachers we must do everything in our power to lessen this “great divide”.  Based on the assessments from the book that we discussed last week, we see we can hold ourselves accountable for learning gains of all students.  As Johnston says, we must become “evaluation experts” because experts see children differently than non-experts (writing: experts see signs of development whereas non-experts see scribble scrabble, reading: experts hear self-correction and monitoring behaviors while non-experts hear only dysfluency and errors).  And struggling readers are not the only ones that need differentiated instruction.  We need to increase the learning rate of high achievers as well as those starting far behind.  Heather and I also discussed how one school used the literacy assessments from our readings to construct a local norm of what they expected of kindergarteners.  From that they could see what the “average yearly progress” looked like for kindergarten student.  So based on that a teacher could see that if a child knows a certain amount of letters at the beginning of the year what reading level they may achieve by the end of the year (0-10: reads back own writing, 11-24: GR Level A, 25-41: GR Level B, 42-47: GR Level C, 48-54: GR Level D or higher).  We felt like this table was closely related to the students in our own classroom.  As we discussed how we would use the results of these literacy assessments, we talked about the two teachers in the book: Ruth and Mandy.  It was interesting to see how they used their test results, placed them into the stages of early literacy development, and the ideas they would use to help them in areas they are struggling.  We also thought about our students from this past year and how they would have fit into each of these stages (letters & sounds kids/sounds kids which are the pretend readers and writers, almost readers-beginning readers and writers, and readers-conventional readers and writers) as the year progressed. 

In Chapter 5, we talked about the different ways of teaching the alphabet, names, and words that were discussed in this chapter.  A child’s name is their most “prized possession” so why not use it to help them learn.  Visual supports and think alouds really help students think about what they are learning.  Students must know what a “letter”, “word”, “sound”, “first,last” is before you can ask them these key concepts.  The use of names from a word wall was neat because they compared the same beginning letters but sometimes that letter makes a different sound.  Using “I spy” or hunt game with the word wall is also beneficial.  Letter sorts, font sorts, making letters (rainbow writing), writing names, name games, name hunts, name graphs, and name sorts are all great ways to teach letters (we have been using some of these already in our classroom).  There are so many useful tools in this chapter that we could have went on and on.  We can see ourselves taking a lot of these activities from this book to incorporate in the upcoming school year. J