Reading resources for emergent literacy

Bryony set up a Teacher's station in her room tonight and I heard her 'teaching' teddies the alphabet.

The resource she uses is by Butterflies, its excellent and well used from my new entrant teaching days. When I hear children in centres singing the alphabet I mention this resource as it is a great visual one for letter and sound development. Literacy learning is so much more than the alphabet and sounds, love of books has been really integral to Bryony's literacy. She had a library card of her own at age two and Hannah, Daddy and I have read to her every day. Did you know...

Boys will speak 7000 words a day, girls will speak 20,000
If a child knows 8 Nursery rhymes by the time they are 4 - they are the best readers
It takes 1000 stories read aloud before a child learns to read a book alone
Source: Mangere Bridge Kindergarten

Bryony wants to read and write so much, she knows she is missing out on information and will now attempt unknown words, persevering to get it right, but she is nearly six now and this takes time. You will see her reading through "There's a Tiger under my bed" and finding all the emergent words she knows.

It is so rewarding to watch a child driven to learn like this and know that she came to this place without any drilling or prompting from Teacher Mummy. My philosophy is that children need to see literacy in meaningful contexts.

"Skills are useful in a holistic, meaning-making context. This is about noticing, recognising, and using the culture's symbol system for making meaing. Making meaning means understanding or breaking codes-recognising and using the fundamental units, symbols, patterns, and conventions of literacy, mathematics, the arts, and ICT." pg. 8, Kei Tua o Te Pae, Book 16, MOE, 2009, You can see exemplars on the Ministry's Educate site but they STILL havn't got Books 16-20 up yet.

For example writing birthday invitations and listing shopping and guests has been Bryony's inspiration lately! only 26 sleeps to go :)

One term in my new entrant days the children decided we wanted to have a 'family breakfast'. All the children wrote their own invitations in their own way, addressed envelopes and we walked to the post box and sent them. Every family turned up!! actually Joshua's family of seven was first at the door in their jammies, pretty impressive.

I think this was so successful because of the invitations and the children's excitement when these arrived, who says you can't have family connections at school?, its not true, and so worth the effort.

Here is another literacy resource I found on Beverly Kaye's Blog from Manaia Kindergarten. You can make your own name with Flickr, my girls are going to have fun with this!!