Week 7 reading

Week 7

19 September 2013

Reading

Tags: Emergent Literacy, Home experiences, child-initiated play, Learning through play, previous experiences

What?

The readings I chose this week were ‘From Sight Words to Emerging Literacy’ and ‘Why Play?’ The literacy reading I chose this week was from another topic. I chose this reading as I want to increase my knowledge and understanding of what emergent literacy is. I chose the numeracy reading to inform me as a future educator how to create rich and meaningful mathematical experiences through play.

So what?

Literacy

I found this reading very interesting as it gave me a greater understanding of what emergent literacy is all about. Emergent literacy can be defined as the process of becoming literate, beginning at birth, and developing throughout a lifetime (Browder, Courtade-Little, Wakeman & Rickelman, 2006). It involves the reading and writing behaviours of children that precede and then develop into conventional literacy. The reading states that some children come to school already knowing how to read as they have experiences rich activities before entering school provided by their parents, older siblings or other adults. However, there are other children that come from settings where there are few experiences in literacy and generally experience more difficulties and delay in learning to read. Although students may not learn to read they may benefit from acquiring emergent literacy skills.

Numeracy

The reading ‘Why Play?’ discusses the importance of play in young children’s learning and how particular theories of play have impacted the teaching of mathematics. The four theories of play that were mentioned were, Piaget, Vygotsky, Bruner and Smilansky and Shefatya. It argues that to support mathematical development through play, play needs quality involvement of an adult at some point. Therefore teacher initiated play is just as essential as child initiated play; however, a balance between the two is important.

Furthermore, the reading points out that learning maths through play enables children to understand that maths can be useful, fun, sociable and cooperative, and is an essential part of the world. It is important to understand that mathematics through play enables young children to make meaning and connections to themselves and of what is around them. It argues that for mathematics to make sense, learning must make links with other learning experience. A quote that stood out to me was that play was not in fact ‘unimportant’ ‘but is a feature of effective early years pedagogy’ (p.6).

Now what?

It is important for us as educators to always remember that each child is unique and different and how the ability of emergent literacy develops can vary considerably. The expectation is that children will gain pre-reading skills and then move on to higher stages of literacy. Through interaction with books and participating stories, sight word drill, and some phonemic awareness, will all help to promote early reading skills.

There are many implications for practice  It is important for educator to understand the role of play in learning and to ensure they offer a play based learning pedagogy. Furthermore, the involvement of an adult is essential in supporting mathematical development for young children. Educators have to create mathematical experiences through play and demonstrate that maths is everywhere and in everything.

Reference List

Browder, D. M., Courtade-Little, G., Wakeman, S., & Rickelman, R. J. (2006). From sight words to emerging literace. In D.M. Browder & F. Spooner, Teaching language arts, math, & science to students with significant cognitive disabilities (pp. 63-91). Baltimore, MA: Paul H Brookes.

Tucker, K. (2010). Why Play? Mathematics through play in the Early Years (pp. 5-14). London: SAGE Publications.