Building Early Literacy Skills in Pre-School Children Essay

Introduction

Building early literacy skills in preschool children requires a combination of techniques. In preparation of the lesson plan, we need to combine different learning styles, encourage active participation of children in learning activities, encourage parental involvement in the learning process of their child, develop the thinking skills of the child, and take measures that build the language and culture of the child. A consideration of these factors is what led to my inclusion of activities such as music, tabletops, visual arts, spelling, story time, and gym session. All these lessons have a unique role to play in the development of the language and literacy needs of the child. Parental involvement has also been encouraged through their involvement in storytelling sessions at home. Overall, the child will have the best development when the teachers and parents are actively involved in the learning process.

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Rationale Language and Culture

I believe that language and culture encourages positive development in children. The teachers can put in place a variety of measures to develop the language of the children. Activities that develop the language in preschool children include reading habits such as dialogic reading. I feel that when the parent or teacher helps the child through dialogic reading, the child improves in language because the adult is able to correct pronunciation mistakes as well as explain why some words are used in certain contexts within the stories. The language-rich dramatic play is also an important part of the development of language in preschool children (Temple et al., 2018). Language-rich dramatic play helps in social, language, and cognitive development of children (nyced.gov, 2013). They are able to improve their fluency in the English language through this activity.

Music is also very important in the development of language for pre-k children. Through music, the children will be able to increase their fluency. This is because music includes rhyming words that can be a challenge for them. Being able to go through this hurdle successfully is a major step towards English literacy. Additionally, I have included "watching cartoons on smart board" in the lesson plan because it is an activity that allows the children to adopt the best vocabularies for the language and literacy needs. Technology is a crucial tool for supporting educational goals.

Active Participation in the Classroom

This is a very important part of the development of any child. Active participation increases the chances of recalling the content from the teacher. As a result, the child will not have difficulty remembering this information when they are required in circumstances such as tests. A conversation with the child offers valuable information about their development (nyced.gov, 2013). Additionally, active participation increases the confidence of the child. The same confidence allows the child to ask questions that they find difficult which gives an opportunity for the teacher to gauge the strengths and weaknesses of each child. In effect, the teacher would understand how to handle the situation that each of the children is in. Some of the methods that the teachers use to encourage active participation include assigning the children to groups (Cook et al., 2015). In that manner, the children can contribute to discussions and involve the teacher in the group discussion when they face challenging topics.

I included a number of activities in the lesson plan that will encourage active participation. Children will participate actively in music by forming groups. Through the music, they will learn pronunciation and the context in which words are used. Additionally, the lesson plan includes spelling games. The spelling games will enable active participation by providing a platform on which each I can gauge the ability of the children to spell words correctly. Spelling games will improve their alphabetic awareness (nyced.gov, 2013). Other activities that encourage active participation in the lesson plan are story time, visual arts, and tabletops.

Learning Styles

Learning style is important for the development of children. The teacher has to combine a variety of learning styles for the children to comprehend the subject matter. Early literacy learning involves a combination of learning methods such as storytelling, dramatic plays, as well as paying attention to individual and group needs. The more preschool children are taught using a variety of learning styles, the more they are able to memorize the content that they are taught (Nyced.gov, 2013).

In the lesson plan, I combined a variety of learning styles to ensure the children get the maximum benefit. I combined activities such as games, gymnastics, arts and story sessions in the learning schedules. Games are important as they help to relieve tension after hectic learning activities that engage the brain more than the body. For instance, a gym session enhances the reading habits of a child hence increasing his/her productivity (nyced.gov, 2013). Also, arts are an important alternative in learning. I included visual arts in the lesson plan because it enables children to express their emotions, opinions, and beliefs (nyced.gov, 2013). Therefore, each of these learning styles provides a different dimension to the objective of improving learning and literacy skills.

Parental Involvement

Parental involvement is important in addressing the learning needs of children. Parents need to make follow-ups regularly to find out what the children are learning in school. In this manner, the parents would understand some of the challenges that the child is facing in school and take appropriate measures to correct the situation (Crosby et al., 2015). Some of the activities that parents should be involved in include storytelling and storybook reading. Some children tend to understand better when they are taught by people who are closely related to them. Therefore, parental involvement plays an important role in the development of early literacy in children.

In the lesson plan, one of the activities that showed the importance of parental involvement is the 'boarding bus' time. During this session, some of the kids will board the bus while some of the parents who have more time can pick up their children from school. Parental involvement is the best way to guarantee the safety of the child (Crosby et al., 2015). On the other hand, boarding the bus has its challenges as the driver needs to understand where each of the children is dropped off. Dropping a child in the wrong destination is rare but when it happens it can result in serious concerns for both the teachers and the parents.

Development of Thinking Skills

People improve their thinking skills when their minds are actively engaged. The same applies to children. They develop their thinking skills through active participation in activities that trigger them to think beyond the ordinary. The most popular ways teachers and parents use to develop thinking skills of children involve asking them questions that require them to apply what they already know to find the answers to the unknowns (Kucirkova et al., 2017). Engaging the children in conversation about their topic of interest broadens their thinking (nyced.gov, 2013).

Some classroom activities such as table tops are important in developing the thinking abilities of children. They can compete with each other in activities that are aimed at improving their language and literacy. In the lesson plan, nearly all the activities are meant to encourage thinking of the child. Dramatic play encourages thinking by allowing role-playing for each of the children (nyced.gov, 2013). Visual arts enable thinking by providing the tools that enable children to practice their craft as well as the teachers to illustrate and correct their mistakes. Spelling games encourage thinking by allowing each of the children to sharpen their literary skills. Lastly, music facilitates thinking as children are given an opportunity to sing either individually or as a group and come up. During music, children have to remember lyrics to the songs hence encouraging thinking.

Complete Description

Target Population

The target population in this instance refers to children who want to develop early literacy skills. In this case, the children involved are mostly from the middle-class society. This means that the children are from families that can afford to pay for the most important family needs such as education. Consequently, most of the children are very healthy and seem like they are from loving families. Ensuring that preschool children have emotional and social balance is more important now than ever (nyced.gov, 2013). The effect of this is that the parents can keep a keen eye on them to find out if they are progressing academically. They are also from loving families. The parents take part in parent-child activities that the school organizes.

Culturally, the children are from diverse racial origins. Most of them are African-American, White, and Asian. They are very friendly to each other hence there are no concerns of some of them feeling like they have been marginalized. A majority of them use English as a first language while a handful of them are struggling because they were introduced to other languages first. This means that they require special attention.

The Pre-requisites and Specific Objectives

The pre-requisite of the activity is that the children involved must be pre-K children. In that regard, the children require the full support of their parents. As much as the teachers will be involved in developing the literacy skills, the parents will have their part to play in the development of their own children. Also, the parents are required to ensure that their children have all the necessary material to facilitate learning.

Additionally, the teachers will require the parents to follow up and find out the progress of their children. As much as the teacher plays the important part in their development, the parent can also contribute by engaging their children in storytelling sessions at home and asking questions related to the learning objective to find out if their child is making progress.

The objective is to improve the language and literacy levels of pre-K children by using different learning approaches. Teachers need to design an environment that increases the curiosity and persistence of children to learn (nyced.gov, 2013). Language and literacy is something that we develop over a long period of time. However, the teachers are in a position to help the children learn faster by using approaches such as shared visual attention, dialogic reading, functional print, and writing centers. Shared visual attention will be an integral part in attaining the objective. This is because children tend to grasp content when the teacher explains while looking at the content that she is explaining. Dialogic reading and the PEER approach to reading are also important as they help children to understand the ideas in the story through the guidance of the adult (Vukelich et al., 2016). Vocabulary is also important for them to make a transition to written forms from oral language (nyced.gov, 2013).

Resources and Materials

The teachers have to ensure that all the materials that are needed to attain the learning objectives are available in the right place all the time. For instance, they need to ensure that the writing center is stocked with crayons, felt-tip pens, markers, papers, and cards among other items. The importance of these resources is to improve the writing skills of children. Children need to develop coordination between the eye and the hand in order to manipulate certain objects effectively (nyced.gov, 20...