Saturday, August 29, 2015
What Will Determine Your Child's Literacy?
I've always known the importance of literacy, but it wasn't until I changed my major to Elementary Education did I know exactly how important it actually is. Reading is something that's always come naturally to me. By the age of 5, I was reading and understanding Junie B. Jones. I was always ahead on my "Reading Counts" points in middle school, and my reading score was my highest on my SAT. It is information to me the effect of literacy versus illiteracy has on children later on in life. "...those who are functionally illiterate are likely to drop out of high school, have behavior and social problems that result in being incarcerated, be chronically ill, live in poverty, and have children who will be illiterate." (p. 4). On the other side of that, the children who learn to read "graduate from high school and possibly college, have strong social skills, enjoy a healthier life, earn a living to support themselves and a family, and have children who are literate." (p. 4). It is crucial to make sure as a teacher that your students are working toward the correct level of literacy.
That being said, it's not always easy, especially if you have parents that aren't as involved in their child's education as they should be. I have a professor who told a group of students that "the number one predictor of academic success is the amount of family involvement." (Donna Williams). Education for young children is not new. Dating back to the 1700's, philosophers have determined that not only the education itself, but also the process of it should be natural. From Rousseau to Pestalozzi, all the way to Froebel, ideas and beliefs of education have been that natural learning is the most effective.
One of the differences between earlier philosophers and Jean Piaget is that Piaget has a theory that cognitive development happens in different stages of a child's life. The Sensorimotor Period lasts from when a child is born until they're two, and this is based on sensory skills. The period between two and seven is the Preoperational Period, which is when language develops and organization begins. The Concrete Operational Period is between ages seven and eleven, and it focuses on abstract ideas and a concrete thought process. The final process is for ages 11 through adulthood and it's the Formal Operations Period. This period focuses on higher levels of thinking and appropriate language usage. (p. 9). It is important to never let these process fail or fall through, because missing one step of it could be crucial to a student's learning process. How will your child become literate? Will it be because of you as a teacher, the parent, or a happy combination of both? Answering this question could be the difference between an illiterate, embarrassed adult and a confident, reading, writing member of society.
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Hi Ally,
ReplyDeleteWhen it comes to contributing a child's literacy I believe that the most important factors are to be contributed to a combination of the theories presented in this first chapter. I think that to answer your main question of "What will determine your child's literacy?" I would say that there is not one single method by which a child will become a literate and contributing societal member. I think that everything is a process, and that a combination of the theories support different children in different ways. This correlates to the Balanced Comprehensive Approach, or the BCA. "The use of a BCA includes careful selection the best theories available and matches learning strategies on these theories to the learning styles of individual children to help them learn to read," (Morrow, 16). Morrow also states on the page prior that, there is "no single method or single combination of methods [that] can successfully teach all children to read. Teachers must know the social, emotional, physical, and intellectual status of the children they teach," (Morrow, 15). This implies that as future teachers, we must understand that all methods to promote literacy will work with varying degrees of success with different students. Thus, each student may be more successful in different ways and with different methods. The best way to determine a child's literacy is to help them to promote their own literacy by teaching them different methods. For some children the whole language approach will work better whereas for others a more phonemic and phonological approach may be appropriate and helpful. Each child will be different, but their literary success will be determined by the effectiveness of the various methods being used to teach each student that correlates with each individual's learning style
I also want to build on your discussion of Piaget a bit. Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development is broken into stages, but for most of us in early and elementary education, we will be working with children in the Preoperational Period as well as the Concrete Operational Period. These times are critical, but for the educator it is essential that we know and understand which developmental stage each student is in. If I am teaching brand new readers in kindergarten, these students should all be well within the Preoperational Period, which means that it is my job to help them learn new methods of language development that will augment their thinking and ability to organize the world around them. If we think back to our Confusabet activity in class, we could classify ourselves as being in the Preoperational Period because we were developing our language and had to think concretely about the letters and pictures that we were looking at in order to decipher what was written on each page. We were organizing the words on the page within our minds, but did not have to think too deeply or abstractly as we would if we were within the Concrete Operational Period. Overall, understanding Piaget's levels and some of what is developmentally appropriate will help teachers and parents to determine how to best promote a child's literacy, while keeping in mind that each student is different and no method will consistently work for everyone.Thus, it is important to use a balanced comprehensive approach in which "skill-based explicit instruction and holistic constructivist ideas," (Morrow, 16) are included. The teacher will select strategies to share with the entire class, but the student will determine how they best learn, and then can promote their own learning and literacy development as well. I believe that every student is an individual and once they learn about how they learn best, they will be more motivated to continue to gain new knowledge and skills.