Jeanie Stouffer

May 2 2018

The Foundations of Literacy Implemented in a Preschool

Classroom
Introduction
For the last three months, I have been in a public preschool classroom that has
implemented an inclusive model. This preschool classroom is in Augusta County,
Virginia, where all of the public preschools are need-based. It is inside a public
elementary school, and the majority of the students in this class will be in Kindergarten in
the fall. It accommodates students from diverse backgrounds.
This preschool classroom has an extensive amount of exposure and opportunities
for children to enhance their language and literacy development. They are learning the
structure of written and spoken English, and the appropriate ways to use it. The
classroom provides opportunities to promote literacy through the student’s interests.
There are students who have very few resources, and through this preschool they
receive the opportunity to develop in an environment outside of home. The students in
this preschool are all considered “at risk,” which means that there are concerns about the
development of the students due to a disability or poverty. The children have to meet
particular criteria of the local, state and federal government to be enrolled in this
preschool.

Linguistic Foundations
There are many opportunities for young children to understand more about
semantics by imitating the teachers, reading the words on posters in the classroom, using
reading and writing materials and communicating to classmates with words. One example
of this I saw portrayed in my public preschool practicum classroom was when the teacher
asked the students to find punctuation marks and capitalization in a sentence she had
written (See Figure 1). When a child had said what they were supposed to, the teacher
would tell them to “give your brain a kiss”; this meant that the child was to kiss their
hand and gently slaps it on their head. I was very impressed when one of the students told
me where a period was located in a book by pointing to a dot at the end of a sentence. He
told me “It means a reader has to take a break.”

Figure 1
 Children are being exposed to learning word structures in English through their
home, local communities, and classrooms. The exposure to linguistic foundations in the
preschool was very important to kids coming from homes where they were not exposed
to much spoken or written English. 1 English Language Learners (ELLs) strongly benefit
from listening and speaking with their English-speaking peers. Unlike children who are
English speakers who have opportunities to hear and use English at home, the classroom
is an ELL’s only opportunity to hear English. In my practicum, there was a child who
knew very few words, and over time I only heard him using one-word utterances, such as
“mommy.”
As children mature in the classroom, they learn that print carries meaning and has
an assortment of purposes. It takes time for young children to understand what others are
trying to communicate to them. They hear figurative language, written English, and ways
to communicate with other English speakers. Young children learn the semantics of
language through listening and interacting with other people.

Motivational Foundations
Teachers need to have some books in their classroom that take in the interests of
his/her students.2 They are more likely to be motivated to learn about reading when they
are reading or listening to a book of personal interest. There was a child in my practicum
classroom who was not fascinated by reading, but he really liked the illustrations in the
book Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear?, a book that was illustrated by Eric
Carle. I gave him a Concepts About Print assessment, and he struggled with telling the
differences between pictures and words. To review the Concepts about Print with him, I
made sure to read him another book illustrated by Eric Carle, so he would be engaged
with the book and more comfortable with identifying pictures and words.
Students should be given opportunities to use writing utensils and paper to
enhance their writing skills and grow in their literacy development.3 In my practicum, I

1
Gail Tompkins, Literacy for the 21st Century: A Balanced Approach (Hoboken: Pearson, 2017), 225-226.
2
Gail Tompkins, Literacy for the 21st Century: A Balanced Approach (Hoboken: Pearson, 2017), 15.
3
Gail Tompkins, Literacy for the 21st Century: A Balanced Approach (Hoboken: Pearson, 2017), 116.
saw students enjoy using writing materials, because they did not feel like they were being
critiqued on their writing skills (See Figure 2). Many of these students attempted to spell
scientific words that they had heard their classroom teacher use during read alouds. These
children asked me how to spell these scientific words, and this portrayed to me that the
students felt comfortable using literacy in the classroom. When children feel comfortable
in the classroom, they are more motivated to do activities that are related to literacy.4

Figure 2

Cognitive Foundations
As young children are learning how to read, they are recognizing words that they
have seen or used before. One of the ways children can easily recognize words are by
word sorts. Words can be sorted, physically or mentally, by sounds, patterns, meaning,
and concepts; it depends on the purpose of the words and what works effectively for the
child.5 There are many activities and lessons that can implemented in the classroom that
promotes the ability of children to learn how to sort words.6

4
Gail Tompkins, Literacy for the 21st Century: A Balanced Approach (Hoboken: Pearson, 2017), 14.
5 6
, Donald Bear, Words Their Way: Word Study for Phonics, Vocabulary, and Spelling Instruction (Upper
Saddle River: Pearson, 2016) 52-59.
 Something that I noticed in my practicum this semester was the amount of
difficulty young students had with writing their first name. When I asked one of the
students to spell out his name, I thought that he would be able to do it by himself, because
it was very easy for me to write my own name. This child was only comfortable with
writing the vowels in his name, and not the consonants. I saw this child getting frustrated
and felt badly for him. In the classroom was a laminated piece of paper with his name
written on it, and we he used this it would help him write parts of his name. I realized that
this was an excellent way for students to learn how to write their names, because they
were able to visually see their name written out (See Figure 3).

Figure 3

One of the activities that helps students implement words is to have an adult read
aloud to them. I gave an oral read aloud of Aesop’s Fable The Tortoise and the Hare to
my practicum class, because it is a very simple story for young children to follow. The
Tortoise and the Hare enabled me to introduce them to some unfamiliar words (e.g.
Tortoise and rest). Instead of the children not paying attention to the spellings of
unfamiliar words, I gave the pronunciation of these words, and showed them the ways
that they can be used in daily living.7

7
Gail Tompkins, Literacy for the 21st Century: A Balanced Approach (Hoboken: Pearson, 2017), 111.
 To distinguish specific key words while telling the story, I did hand movements
after an action word was used and did not make any hand movements for the characters
in the book. Through read alouds, students can learn the differences between nouns and
verbs. They learn that a verb tends to mean a body movement, while nouns are
represented by the characters in the story. My goal was that the children would know
what the words meant because I taught them with the story of The Tortoise and the Hare.

Sociocultural Foundations
Most ELLs in an elementary school classroom not only have difficulties with
learning English, but they also lack cultural knowledge that is commonly used in
classrooms.8 Many ELLs were born in the United States, but their parents were born in
another country. An ELL is exposed to their parent’s culture at home instead of the
United States culture, because their parents are very familiar with their original culture. 9
My practicum classroom did not have any ELLs, but I have seen practices used by
students that have also benefitted ELL students.
There has been extensive research on the benefits of the KWL chart for ELLs. It
contains three columns: what the children know, what they wish to know, and what they
learned.10 It would start out with the teacher asking the students what they knew about the
unit. The teacher will write student’s comments from books and discussions onto a large
piece of paper. This practice has been very beneficial for ELLs, because they are being
exposed to knowledge that is probably not taught in their home. Their English-speaking
peers are putting ideas in the KWL chart that might be new to them, and their teachers
can work one-on-one with them to explain what is being said on the KWL.11
My classroom teacher did a KWL in her classroom every month. For an example,
when the students were starting to learn about plants, the teacher would ask students to
raise their hand and say what they knew about plants. She would make sure that she got
answers from a representative amount of students, and she would write these answers
under the know column. The students said statements such as dinosaurs ate plants and
that flowers are plants. Then, the teacher would ask what the students wanted to know
about plants by telling them to ask questions about plants. The questions included “Do
we eat plants?” and “Can plants and flowers have too much water?” The KWL chart was
stuck in the book nook of the classroom until the unit was finished (See Figure 4).

Figure 4

8
Gail Tompkins, Literacy for the 21st Century: A Balanced Approach (Hoboken: Pearson, 2017), 90.
9
Gail Tompkins, Literacy for the 21st Century: A Balanced Approach (Hoboken: Pearson, 2017), 28.
10 11
, Gail Tompkins, Literacy for the 21st Century: A Balanced Approach (Hoboken: Pearson, 2017), 448.
 When the teacher was finishing up the unit, she would read aloud what the
students knew before the unit and what they wished they knew. Then, the teacher would
ask the students to answer the questions that were related to what they wanted to know at
the beginning of the unit. The student’s answers would be written under the learned
category. This chart showed how the student’s knowledge on a subject progressed within
a month, and what they knew as they advance in school.