December 2019
Learning with Literacy Lab
Our school is committed to reflective practice — thinking deeply about our work, asking ourselves questions about what we have done, and refining our practices based on those conversations.
In the past few years, we have been thinking about literacy learning throughout the school and specifically for our fours, in the year before kindergarten.
A number of years ago, all of the pre-K teachers did a training on Handwriting Without Tears, learning how to support children in the foundations of their emergent writing. A few years ago, we added journal writing to our fours classes. And this year, we introduced our Literacy Lab.
All of these enhancements were carefully put in place to assure that our students go on to kindergarten with the skills and the confidence to be successful in their learning. Each of these additions was implemented in a manner that was in keeping with our commitment to developmentally appropriate practice, honoring children and acknowledging that children learn best through play.
The Literacy Lab is a place where students in our fours classes work in small groups on foundational literacy skills, including phonological awareness, oral language, concepts of print, phonemic awareness, and knowledge of the alphabet.
The room is designed to encourage children to work independently using different modalities; kinesthetic learning occurs through the use of the curriculum sounds in motion, visual learning through poems, tactile learning with loose parts and play dough, auditory learning through songs and rhyming.
Erica Negrin is our literacy specialist. Erica has been a teacher in our threes class and this year is excited to be taking on this new venture. Erica has a wealth of training and experience in the field. After completing her bachelor’s degree in elementary and special education and a master’s in early childhood and special education, she worked for five years as a special education teacher in an integrated co-teaching kindergarten classroom in New York.
Working with small groups of three or four children at a time has given Erica a chance to really assess each student’s skills and support them in building their confidence and targeting specific areas to strengthen their knowledge.
Throughout the year, the fours teaching team will have a chance to meet and reflect on what is going on in the Literacy Lab and how we can best prepare the children to become lifelong learners and lovers of reading.
Parents and teachers have already expressed enthusiasm about this new innovative program. We are proud once again to be breaking new ground as we develop new ways to encourage and support children’s learning.
