Alphabetics for Emerging Learners

Building Strong Reading Foundations in PreK

Heidi Anne E. Mesmer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000430974
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

Discover how to help PreK students develop pre-reading competencies that build capacity for future reading phonological awareness, print concepts, and alphabetics. Research-based and accessible, this essential guidebook helps readers sidestep common errors and create engaging, child-appropriate curriculum that lays a strong foundation for future reading skills. Filled with effective resources, activities, and a simple scope and sequence to guide instruction, this critical toolkit equips educators to set emerging learners up for success.

1

Beginning with Some Basics

DOI: 10.4324/9781003130918-1

“You don’t have to be great to start but you have to start to be great.”

~ Zig Ziglar

We love this quote. It reminds us that starting is the key to doing anything well and sometimes starting is the hardest part—picking up pen and putting it to paper or cracking open the pages of a new book. So, thank you for choosing this book and for an interest in being a great early childhood educator. We take your investment of time seriously, and we promise to deliver high quality content to help you teach young children the foundations upon which later reading success are based.

So how did we come to write this book? Why did we start? Perhaps a little vignette from author Heidi Anne will set the stage. It tells about her experience in a classroom of three-year-olds.

I will never forget an experience I had as I was conducting an early learning study in a three-year-old room. As I came into the classroom, I remember one of the teachers inviting me to come see the children. “We go over letters 30 minutes every day and they really know their letters,” she said, possibly trying to impress me. I admit to having questions about spending that much time on letters in a three-year-old room, but one Friday, near the end of the study, I finally acquiesced, doubtful but agreeable. As I watched, I actually started to be impressed.

“Tt /tttt urtle/ Bb /bbbbbat/,” the children said, as the teacher pointed to different letters on a chart.

I even noticed when the teacher took the pictures away and pointed to the letters, the children could identify those with the right beginning sound (apple, bat, etc.).

“These kids really do know their letters! They even know some sounds,” I thought.

As I made my way around the room, I leaned in to talk to Jasmine, an adorable little girl with braids all over her head and bright pink barrettes. She was at a writing center using a marker and paper, making her best attempts to write the shapes of letters. Given what I had seen, I thought it would be fun to help her “spell” her name using the first letter. So, I started by pointing to an alphabet chart nearby and asking, “Which one is the letter Jj?” She immediately pointed to the Jj. “Wow! Now what sound for Jj?” Again, she said, “Jj is for jam,” using the picture on the chart. “Wow,” I thought, “this is pretty impressive for three-year-olds,” as I dove into the next step, which revealed something very interesting.

“Let’s write your name, Jasmin. Listen jjjjjjasmine. What letter should I use to start Jasmin?”

She looked up at me with a blank stare, and I looked back a little puzzled as well. I realized that she really did not understand how to use the letter-sound information that she had memorized. In fact, she was not able to apply it to a very important word—her name! She had not made the connection between the sound /j/ in jam and the /j/ in Jasmine. She was able to name the letter and was saying the right things, but she did not really hear the sound or connect the information. All that “alphabet” instruction was for naught. She could not use that information. What Jasmin had done was memorize information without knowing how to use it.

At some level, this might have been the seed for this book. The instructional approach here was not bad, but it would be best for children at least a year older. In addition, as Jasmin showed, letter instruction should never take place in a vacuum but should occur alongside meaningful practices that demonstrate the uses of letter knowledge.

This experience made us both realize that something is getting lost in translation. Between the standards, curricula, and professional developments on teaching the alphabet and the classroom practice, something is going wrong. Clearly, a straightforward resource focused specifically on how to teach letters and the related supports was needed. Clearly, something for preschool settings was needed. And so, this book was born.

As authors, we form a team with complimentary experiences and perspectives. Heidi Anne is a senior faculty member and literacy researcher who has been writing books for teachers and conducting literacy research for over 20 years. Anna is a new literacy researcher, living with her own set of preschoolers as a parent. Both of us are experienced teachers who have spent, and continue to spend, a great deal of time in classrooms with teachers and children. We have designed this book with care and a fair amount of honest feedback to create a pragmatic, research-based resource that can be opened up and used on a daily basis in the classroom.

This first chapter has several purposes. In the first section, we describe the book’s focus—teaching alphabetics—and we say more about what we mean by emergent and alphabetics. We also show how our book connects to the Head Start Early Learning Outcomes domains. In the next section, we face a few controversies in the early childhood community and resolve them by noting that forced choices are not needed. Teachers do not need to choose between play and academics, or social–emotional learning and literacy, for example. In the third section, we layout typical literacy development, a path that educators must understand. In the last section, we provide an overview of the chapters in the book that take the reader from understanding how the English alphabet works to how to teach and assess what young children need to know in the areas of print concepts, phonological awareness, and letters.

This Book’s Focus

Twenty years ago, a book entitled Alphabetics for Emerging Learners would have been improbable, but today’s early childhood educator most certainly knows that teaching children the alphabet, phonological awareness, and print concepts are essential. At the onset, we want to be clear about two words that we use in this title, very purposefully—alphabetics and emerging. We also want to connect the book to current standards. Each state has its own preschool learning standards related to literacy, and many are similar. In order to ground this book with a common perspective, we refer to Head Start’s Early Learning Outcomes Domains. There are three central domains, social/emotional, language and literacy, and cognition. This book focuses in the Language and Literacy central domain, which has two sections, Language and Communication, and Literacy. As the title suggests, the book will focus on the Literacy domain for children aged 36–60 months and, in particular, three out of the four subdomains, a) Phonological Awareness (P-Lit1); b) Print and Alphabet Knowledge—Print Concepts (P-Lit2); c) Print and Alphabet Knowledge—Alphabet Knowledge (P-Lit 3); and d) Writing (P-Lit 4, Spelling & Handwriting). For your convenience, these domains are specified across each of the two age ranges (i.e., 36–48 months, 48–60 months) in Table 1.1, below.

We can imagine that early childhood educators might be wondering, “But wait, isn’t language and communication important too? What about the Comprehension subdomain of literacy (P-Lit 5)?” From our perspective, this book must dedicate precious space to thoroughly communicating all the solid research and best practices that support children’s learning of letters, print concepts, and phonemes, vital information that is pivotal to their ability to decode and read words in the future. After several attempts to “squeeze it all in,” we realized that high quality vocabulary and comprehension instruction in preschool is itself a meaty endeavor that should be thoroughly addressed in a book of this length. We did not want to relegate this content to a “check the box” chapter in a book about teaching alphabetics. (We would happily write such a book if invited.)

Table 1.1 Head Start’s Early Learning Outcomes Domains: Three literacy domains focused on in this book

Developmental Progression		Indicators
36 to 48 Months	48 to 60 Months	By 60 Months
• Goal P-LIT 1. Child demonstrates an awareness that spoken language is composed of smaller segments of sound (Phonological Awareness)
Shows rote imitation and enjoyment of rhyme and alliteration. With support, distinguishes when two words rhyme and when two words begin with the same sound.	Demonstrates rhyme recognition, such as identifying which words rhyme from a group of three: hat, cat, log. Recognizes phonemic changes in words, such as noticing the problem with “Old McDonald had a charm.” Is able to count syllables and understand sounds in spoken words.	• Provides one or more words that rhyme with a single given target, such as “What rhymes with log?” • Produces the beginning sound in a spoken word, such as “Dog begins with /d/.” • Provides a word that fits with a group of words sharing an initial sound, with adult support, such as “Sock, Sara, and song all start with the /s/ sound. What else starts with the /s/ sound?”
• Goal P-LIT 2. Child demonstrates an understanding of how print is used (Functions of Print) and the rules that govern how print works (Conventions of Print)
Distinguishes print from pictures and shows an understanding that print is something meaningful, such as asking an adult “What does this say?” or “Read this.”	Begins to demonstrate an understanding of the connection between speech and print. Shows a growing awareness that print is a system that has rules and conventions, such as holding a book correctly or following a book left to right.	• Understands that print is organized differently for different purposes, such as a note, list, or storybook. • Understands that written words are made up of a group of individual letters. • Begins to point to single-syllable words while reading simple, memorized texts. • Identifies book parts and features, such as the front, back, title, and author.
• Goal P-LIT 3. Child identifies letters of the alphabet and produces correct sounds associated with letters
Shows an awareness of alphabet letters, such as singing the ABC song, recognizing letters from one’s name, or naming some letters that are encountered often.	Recognizes and names at least half of the letters in the alphabet, including letters in own name (first name and last name), as well as letters encountered often in the environment. Produces the sound of many recognized letters.	• Names 18 uppercase and 15 lowercase letters. • Knows the sounds associated with several letters.
• Goal P-LIT 4. Child demonstrates an understanding ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Meet the Authors
• 1 Beginning with Some Basics
• 2 English Alphabetics for Teachers
• 3 Teaching Phonological Awareness
• 4 Shared Reading and Interactive Writing to Teach Print Concepts and the Alphabetic Principle
• 5 Teaching Letters and Letter-Sounds
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Appendix C
• Appendix D