Chapter 4 blog

Emergent literacy is how children learn to read and write. As future teachers we have to make learning and reading fun, by incorporating interactive writing and educational activities. Children are constantly emerging and learning new stuff everyday.
One of the major points in this chapter is that both reading and writing have 3 stages: Emergent, beginning, and fluent. In emergent reading children gain an understanding of the communicative purpose of print, another words they recognize that words in a book are just words they actually mean something. Also, in this stage children can predict all or most of a book after they have memorized the pattern. When I taught the pre-k class at my daycare for a week while their teacher was out, I was real surprised that the children knew what was going to happen before I even turned the page. I later came to the realization that their normal teacher reads this book to them everyday. A way to incorporate this in the classroom is to find books that can be easily memorized with repeated sentences, rhymes. They help children learn sequence and predictability. In the beginning stage, the foundation that they have made in the emergent stage is applied in this stage. Children learn phoneme-grapheme correspondences and begin to decode words. In the fluent stage, children have learned to read, they recognize words automatically and decode words they don't know quickly. Most students should reach this stage by third grade.
The Language Experience Approach is based on children's language and experiences. Children dictate words and sentences about their experiences, and the teacher takes down the dictation for them and the text they develop becomes the reading material. I can see how this can help a child and also see where it can discourage a child. It helps the child put their thoughts on paper and be able to see it and not just think it and on the other hand by the teacher doing the writing the child may not want to do their own writing because the teacher's writing is per say "perfect" as opposed to their"kid writing" or since the teacher is doing the writing the child may get use her doing it and not want to do their own writing themselves. Also practice makes perfect so if the child keeps practicing writing they will continue to get better. You can incorporate this into the classroom is by asking the child about a certain experience, write down the experience and read it aloud as the child becomes familiar with the text and can read it themselves. My personal experience with this approach is again when I taught my class at daycare, they got so used to me writing for them they didn't want to do it themselves.