Building Literacy With Love
From Zero to Three Press
by BETTY S. BARDIGE
AND MARILYN M. SEGAL
EXCERPT
Learning to read begins in early infancy and continues beyond childhood. Poems to Learn to Read By:Building Literacy With Love celebrates the early phases of this process, and provides parents and teachers of young children with tools to support their emerging language and literacy.
Poems to Learn to Read By is really several books in one. It is, first and foremost, a collection of poems for young children and adults to enjoy together. Some of the poems are humorous, some are informative, and some are evocative or instructive. Some tell stories, and others simply play with sounds and words. The poems address the interests, feelings, and questions of young children, in words they can understand and enjoy. Many lend themselves to acting out, singing, chanting, or choral reading.
The poems are also designed to foster emergent literacy. Poetry can be especially powerful in this regard because it highlights the sounds and sound patterns of language. Its short stanzas, rhyme, rhythm, and repetition of sounds make it fun to recite and easy to memorize. The introductions to each chapter highlight parenting and teaching strategies that researchers have found to be effective in building young children's language and literacy. Each poem is accompanied by an annotation for parents and teachers. In some cases, the annotations tell the story of the children, experiences, or folk tradition that inspired us to write the poem. They also describe how to use and extend the poem to strengthen children's language, enhance their relationships, and build their literacy skills. Thus Poems to Learn to Read By is also a resource for parents and teachers who are interested in "building literacy with love."
Next, Poems to Learn to Read By is an ABC book. Hidden within its thematically organized chapters are 25 poems that feature particular letters (X shares its poem with W). These poems can be used to help children learn the names and sounds of letters, a key step in learning to read.
Finally, Poems to Learn to Read By is a rich collection of accessible texts for children who are just beginning to read on their own. Although some of the poems deliberately introduce challenging vocabulary, most rely heavily on short, regularly spelled, common words that are easy for beginners to decode.
SAMPLE POEMS
I Won’t Eat My Lunch
I won’t eat my lunch
And you can’t make me do it.
I will spit out the hot-dog
Because I can’t chew it.
I hate all the spinach
The liver is worst.
If you make me eat it
My tummy will burst.
I won’t even look
At that caramel custard
And I’ll only eat French fries
With ketchup and mustard.
If you give me some yogurt
With sprinkles on top.
I will eat just four bites
And then I will stop.
Many parents and teachers of toddlers and preschoolers will recognize the narrator of this poem. No matter what is offered for a meal, the child has some complaint. The carrots are no good because they touched the peas, the yogurt can only be eaten with rainbow sprinkles, the sandwich can’t have even a trace of crust, or has to be cut into triangles instead of squares. One day’s favorite food may be rejected the next.
The real issue, of course, is control. The child is learning to make choices, and to use his words to make his preferences known. Offering choices when you can builds the child’s self-esteem and his language. What would you like to drink with your sandwich? Should I cut the cheese into squares or triangles? How many pieces of apple would you like? Should I make the rice sticky or fluffy?
After sharing the poem with children, you might ask them to talk about the foods they like and the foods they don’t like. Is their anything alike about those they love or those they hate? Do some foods come up on everyone’s lists?
A fun activity to do with a group of preschoolers is to make a bar graph of favorite foods. Start by helping children find pictures of favorite foods in grocery store ads, or use stickers with pictures of different foods . On a large piece of paper, create a graph with a column for each food. Place a picture of the food at the bottom of the column and write its name underneath. Let children take turns coloring in a square on the graph (or pasting a sticker in the square) for each food that they like. Show them how to fill in the columns from the bottom up, using a different color (or sticker) for each food. When they are finished, the class will be able to see which foods are the most and least popular. Some children will enjoy counting how many “votes” the different foods received.
My Hamster
I have a happy hamster
He always loves to play.
He did some very clever tricks
The day before yesterday.
He made his cage jump up and down
And then he tried to sit.
I laughed so hard when I watched him
I almost had a fit.
Hamsters (and gerbils) make great classroom pets because their antics are so much fun to watch. A class pet also provides many opportunities to support emergent literacy - without the children even realizing it. Children can make a nametag for the pet's cage and a sign that invites visitors to view their new pet, tells them he likes to be watched and talked to, or warns them that he doesn't like to be picked up. They can teach each other to follow simple, written instructions for daily feeding (you can use rebuses to show how many spoonfuls of food to give and to remind them to refill the water bottle.) They can follow a simple chart that tells whose turn it is to feed the pet or clean the cage. In the process, they are likely to learn to recognize their own and each others names, as well, of course, as the name of their pet.
