Heather Smith, Learning Specialist
Post Date: March 17, 2023

Let’s begin by taking a tour, and a stroll around the block of early elementary classrooms. The first stop is pre-kindergarten. On one side of the classroom, the teacher is reading aloud to students gathered on the rug. She periodically pauses to engage the children in dialogue, asking them open-ended questions to inspire thinking. The teacher, embracing the read-aloud as a powerful literary experience, is developing vocabulary, conceptual understandings, and listening comprehension. In the adjoining classroom, pre-kindergarteners are engaged in collaborative storytelling. The teacher selected three puppets which the students animatedly identify as a ballerina, a wizard, and a bear. Now that they have their characters established, they move on to the setting. Students enthusiastically brainstorm possibilities such as a sea monster’s cave, a palace, an ocean, or a black hole. Once the setting is agreed upon (a mansion that is twirling around a black hole), volunteers contribute ideas about the plot within the framework of beginning, middle, and end. As they delightedly listen to their story told back to them, the teacher points out that their story has a problem and a solution that students readily identify. I am reminded of the intricate relationship between oral language development and literacy.

The next stop is kindergarten. One step into the classroom and evidence of a print-rich environment is everywhere…letters, popcorn words, morning messages, and an abundance of books. At this particular moment, there is a kindergartner pointing to letter cards mounted on the wall, confidently leading the class in a systematic review of sound-symbol correspondences. The teacher then engages the class in a multisensory word-building activity. Students tap out phonemes in consonant-vowel-consonant words using their fingers and then manipulate letter tiles on their magnetic boards to encode and decode the phonetically regular words. Clearly, the routine for this work has been well-established. Predictable and consistent, the students know exactly what to do. The teacher understands that this systematic practice is foundational to the word reading skills that increasingly complex literacy experiences will demand.

Next is first grade. Students are enthusiastically reading this week’s poem projected on the whiteboard and added to their poetry notebooks. They are practicing oral reading fluency, clearly mindful of pacing, and punctuation, and using their voices to convey meaning. Earlier in the week they discussed vocabulary words, made self-to-text connections, practiced visualization, and even touched upon inferential thinking, all important facilitators of comprehension. Today, they are searching the poem for trick words and familiar patterns and concepts introduced via the Fundations program. Students are eagerly volunteering to come to the board to circle sight words, underline base words, circle the suffix -s, and box glued sounds (-ang, -ing, -ong, -ung; -ank, -ink, -onk, -unk). Tomorrow, I’ve been told, they will focus on parts of speech, identifying the multitude of action words (verbs) and adjectives contained in the poem.

In the classroom across the hall, students have just engaged in a non-fiction, informational text read aloud on life cycles. They have noticed text features: table of contents, captions, bolded text, glossary, and index. The teacher has compiled a stack of library books and leads the students in an animated exploration of genre. The tone is joyful, with every student actively engaged and participating.

Last stop, second grade. A small reading group is highly engaged at a round table. The group, having previously read an informational text on the Sierra Nevada mountain range, is previewing a fiction book told from the perspective of a bald eagle as she soars over Mount Whitney, Yosemite Falls, and Lake Tahoe. Through her account, the eagle highlights the beauty and serenity of her majestic world, describing plants, wildlife, and land formations. Prior to reading, the teacher previews vocabulary words. It is clear that the students are becoming proficient at analyzing multisyllabic words for morphological structure, syllable types, and phonetic elements. Students know that just about any word they will ever encounter in reading will be made up of various combinations of the six syllable types they will be learning in second grade. How empowering! On our way out, we notice chart paper on which second graders brainstormed and collected words from their reading ending with -ic. We note vocabulary such as diagnostic, aquatic, geographic, dynamic, historic, republic, heroic, diplomatic, sympathetic, and cosmic. Wait a minute…this is a second grade classroom?

Back in the Reading Room, I am filled with appreciation for the expertise of my colleagues and how they masterfully incorporate this rich, varied, and important literary work into their practice. In each classroom, I noted evidence of the five essential components of a successful reading program outlined by the National Reading Panel in 2000: explicit instruction in phonemic awareness, systematic phonics instruction, oral reading experiences that promote fluency, vocabulary development, and comprehension. Most importantly, I observed instruction that is rooted in what we know about the science of reading.

For more about the primary understandings and current research about early literacy development that inform our program, please read the complete article on the school website.