Teaching Young Children to Read and Write

Throughout this course you have been reading, writing, listening, speaking, and thinking about evidence-based strategies and approaches to teaching children how to read and write. One of the purposes of this course was to challenge you to rethink traditional practices, observe teaching strategies with new perspectives and better conceptualize the creation of a balanced approach to K-3 literacy instruction.

The Signature Assignment in this course posits the question “How do we best teach K-3 students to read and write?” This will be evidenced through the compilation of a 10-12 page research paper separated into four sections

• Children’s Literacy Development
• Organizing for Literacy Instruction
• Teaching and Learning Strategies/Methods
• Literacy Assessment

This academic paper will also contain a clear introduction and conclusion and use APA is conventions as is required in graduate level writing.

The Signature Assignment address overarching questions such as:

What are students expected to know and be able to do to be successful readers and writers?

What instructional opportunities are necessary to support successful students?

How do we best assess literacy development?

What is the role of technology in a balanced K-3 literacy environment?

The Signature Assignment is an opportunity to demonstrate your understanding of research, strategies, and techniques learned in the course and how you plan to apply this knowledge in your own classroom practices in connection with evidence-based findings. A signature assignment rubric is included to help guide your development of this important scholarly work. Please review it carefully to determine you have completed this capstone assignment according to the required specifications and to the degree to which you aspire.

Examples from the course

Organizing for Instruction

Approaches to teach reading and writing:

• Guided reading
• Basal reading programs
• Literature focus units
• Literature circles
• Reading and writing workshops

Teaching and Learning strategies/Methods

Reading

Decoding word-learning

Study comprehension

Digital

Nonlinearity Intertextuality

Interactivity Multiple modalities

Writing

Prewriting Editing

Drafting publishing

revising

Literacy Assessments

• Conferences
• Checklist
• Student’s work samples
• Rubrics
• Anecdotal notes
• Diagnostic test
• Informal reading inventories
• Miscue analysis
• Monitoring
• Observation
• Phonemic awareness
• Portfolios
• Running record
• Standardized test

Websites:

https://www.learner.org/workshops/tml/workshop5/te…

https://www.k12reader.com/balanced-literacy-instru…

http://www.readingrockets.org/article/types-inform…

https://twowritingteachers.org/2017/09/15/acloserl…

https://standardizedtests.procon.org/#background

https://www.k5chalkbox.com/6-trait-writing.html