A Balanced Literacy Program
Ensuring That Children Learn the Early Literacy Skills, Strategies and Concepts Needed for Later School Success
Literacy learning at the Kindergarten level has never been more important. The Ministry of Education and many Boards of Education now lay out specific targets and standards for the levels of literacy achievement children are expected to make at each grade level, beginning in Kindergarten. The standards and targets in Kindergarten are considered crucial to reach because they set the foundation upon which all further literacy skills will be built. Indeed early school achievement, especially in reading and writing, has been found to be a reliable predictor of later school achievement.
Unfortunately, many public school teachers have not been adequately trained to enable young children to reach these high standards. Children then enter grade one at a disadvantage and struggle to reach that grade’s standards. They then tend to fall further and further behind their peers with each successive school year. These children then face long waiting lists to receive special assistance or their parents feel forced to pay private tutors expensive fees in order to enable their children to “catch up”.
In the Balanced Literacy Program, children are taught all the skills, strategies and concepts needed to meet and exceed provincial and board standards. The program is taught by expert teachers who specialize in early literacy acquisition. They deliver a program in which there is an explicit instruction in such literacy skills as:
- Concepts about print
- Phonics and Phonemic Awareness
- The Reading Process
- Reading Strategies and Skills
- Spelling Strategies and Skills
- Oral Language Skills
- Reading Comprehension and Critical Thinking Skills
- Grammar and Word Usage Skills
All of these skills, strategies and concepts are taught in a stimulating, creative way using the finest of children’s literature, and through such themes as nursery rhymes, fairy tales, and folktales.
The Balanced Literacy Program
The last twenty years have brought sweeping changes in literacy education. New information about how children learn language and become literate has lead to the development of empowering instructional strategies and programs. Balanced Literacy encompasses all of the best literacy practices and research of the past twenty years in order to ensure that all children learn the fundamental literacy skills that they need despite different learning styles or needs.
It incorporates a flexible framework of eight instructional components and emphasizes oral language across the curriculum working with letters and words, the unifying aspect of integrated themes, on-going observations, assessments, and the role of a home-school partnership. Each element in the framework requires a different level of support from the teacher and respects the level of control or independence of the children.
Through the Balanced Literacy instructional approach, the emphasis is on teaching children a variety of literacy skills and strategies that they can eventually use independently when reading, writing and spelling. The goal of the program is to essentially equip each child with a “toolbox” of effective “literacy tools” that they can continue to hone and use throughout their literacy education. The overall goal of the program is to ensure that the child becomes an:
- Independent, fluent and strategic reader
- Independent, fluent and strategic writer
- Independent, fluent and strategic speller
- Independent, fluent and strategic thinker
- Independent, fluent and strategic talker and listener
Through the balanced literacy framework, children are taught in such a way that literacy is personal, functional and enjoyable. The framework of early literacy lessons are unified and integrated through stimulating, creative and fun themes and extensions. Children not only learn critical literacy processes, they develop a deep love and appreciation for reading, writing and spelling. The young child is guided in learning what written language is, how it works and how to use it for many purposes. Reading and writing is interrelated: what is learned in one area makes it easier to learn in the other. Children learn simple “Five Step Processes” for both reading and writing activities, and how to use their literacy tools within those processes.
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There are currently no |
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April 2010
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March 2010
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Contact us! Phone: 416-544-0133 Fax: 416-544-0437 Email: early.years@bellnet.ca