Early Childhood

1
Early Childhood
Janet Fellowes Edith Cowan University

• Language and Literacy Development

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Child Development

• The process of growth from Infancy early
  childhood middle childhood adolescence
• Orderly transition through stages
• There are regularities and continuities but there
  is always individual difference
• Occurs across many dimensions
• Physical Development
• Cognitive Development
• Language and Literacy Development
• Personal and Emotional Development
• Social and Moral Development
• Spurred by internal factors and shaped by
  external factors

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Literacy Developmental

• Emergent
• Early
• Fluent

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• Children progress through the stages of literacy
  learning in different ways and at different
  tempos
• Individual children take a variety of routes to
  reading and writing competency
• Children can move forward in some areas of
  literacy learning at different times and at
  different rates than in other areas of learning
• Learning all the aspects of reading and writing
  does not happen evenly
• Within each stage their will be learners at
  different places of development.

5
Oral Language Development

• Comprehensive oral language development is
  fundamental to reading and writing development
• Phonology (speech sounds)
• Morphology (word formation)
• Syntax (sentence formation)
• Semantics (word and sentence meaning)
• Prosody Intonation and rhythm of speech)
• Pragmatics (effective and functional use of oral
  language)

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Development of Phonological Awareness

• Phonemic Awareness is an important to determining
  the success of learning to read and write.
• Hear words in a sentence
• Hear rhymes
• Onset rhyme (separate starting letter from the
  rhyming part)
• Hear syllables in words
• Phonemic awareness

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Story and expository text comprehension

• Understanding of the narrative structure of a
  text.
• Understanding of various structures of expository
  texts
• -predict and expectations for making meaning

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The alphabetic principle

• The knowledge that writing is oral language
  written down
• The knowledge that we use a symbol or symbols to
  represent sounds within a word

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The Emergent Literacy StageDevelopmentally
Appropriate Practice

• Emergent literacy experiences are essential for a
  child to experience maximum success in gaining
  literacy skills and competency in early primary
  grades.
• Emphasises real life situations and social
  experiences for the development of literacy.
• Emphasises problem solving rather than direct
  instruction of sets of skills.

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• Literacy learning activities are embedded
  purposefully within content areas such as art,
  music, play, social studies and science to
  ensure there is meaning involved.
• Capitalises on childrens strengths and
  compensates for their weaknesses.
• Child centred.
• Builds childrens literacy knowledge and
  understandings and develops some basic skills and
  processes.
• .
• Oral language is fundamental to a sound
  pre-primary literacy program as it is a
  predecessor to reading and writing.

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The Emergent Literacy StageImportant
Kindergarten andPre-Primary Experiences

• Imaginative / Dramatic Play advances cognitive
  development children develop more sophisticated
  language skills opportunity to role play /
  engage in reading and writing role play
  behaviour in a real context
• Modelling / Demonstrating of reading and writing
  behaviours

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• Sharing and discussing books
• Listening to Repeated Book Readings
• A print rich environment
• Language games and rhymes
• Phonological games and rhymes
• Opportunities for talk and listening

13

• Children given opportunity to experiment with
  writing this can sometimes be drawing
• Extend vocabulary and syntax (sentence
  structures)
• Shared writing (children tell a story teacher
  writes it down)
• Shared Reading
• - Interactive story reading)
• Language Experience
• Modeled writing

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• Chart class made stories , songs, rhymes
• Create books recounting excursions
• Words and labels around the room
• Writing centre
• The mailbox
• Story centre felt boards, puppets
• Library corner

15
Oral Language (receptive and expressive)

• Listening with attention and for different
  purpose (e.g. to follow directions, to engage in
  conversation)
• Speaking for different purpose and to different
  audiences
• Use sentences of increasing length and
  grammatical complexity
• Speech production / pronunciation of individual
  sounds / words
• Vocabulary (word meaning comprehend and use new
  words)

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Reading and Writing

• Understand the different genre structures
• Understand the social function of reading and
  writing
• Motivation toward reading interested in books,
  enjoys listening to them and discussing them.
• Confidence to attempt to read and write
• Concepts about print
• Knowledge of alphabet

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• Sound letter correspondence
• Punctuation, capitalization and other conventions
• Eye-hand coordination
• Fine motor skills
• Comprehension
• Visual and auditory memory
• Cognitive reasoning
• Semantic memory
• Ability to note detail
• Imaginative skills
• Knowledge of literary forms
• Connects information in books to real life