| Another consideration in early childhood care and education settings is the activities and curricula that teachers adopt in order to foster emergent literacy and early reading. Emergent literacy activities in classrooms fall into two broad categories—book reading and focusing on sounds and letters (i.e., learning the letters of the alphabet or playing rhyming games) (Whitehurst et al., 1994). Just as at home with parent-child shared book reading, the quality of group book reading in child care settings is important. Teachers should encourage children to be engaged and thinking during group book reading. Training in phonological awareness and teaching letter-sound knowledge have also been shown to help children learn to read. Among other things, phonological training helps children learn to detect rhymes, categorize sounds (e.g., “Which word is different: mop, top, pop, can?”), and segment words into phonemes (National Research Council, 1998). This sort of phonologically-based instruction is designed to help children with their decoding skills. It stands in contrast to whole language instruction, by which children are taught to focus on the meaning of text when learning to read, and to use context to figure out unfamiliar words. Evidence suggests that the whole language approach is effective only when combined with phonics instruction (Whitehurst & Lonigan, 1998). |
