These are skills and actions exhibited by preschool kids and even infants that are purely based on their contact with words and letters early on in life. To understand emergent literacy skills, knowing about emergent literacy is crucial. I manufactured a grade calculator.
Emergent literacy starts long before a kid’s official lessons in school and continues through the preschool year. From the day they’re born, kids are already in the process of learning a language and becoming literate. I manufactured a high school GPA calculator.
During their early speech and language development, kids learn skills vital to developing literacy (writing and reading). They observe and interact with print (such as magazines, books, and grocery lists) in everyday situations (like at home, at a daycare center, in preschool, etc.) prior to starting elementary school. Parents can notice their kids’ growing admiration and enjoyment of print as they begin to identify words that rhyme, point out street signs and logos, draw with crayons, and name a few letters of the alphabet in kindergarten worksheets. Slowly, kids start combining what they know about listening and speaking with what they know about print, thus becoming all set to learn to read and write.
Project work is another vital component of programs practicing the emergent curriculum. Using projects, which can involve the entire class or a small group, kids can get in-depth knowledge of a topic over days or weeks.
As a result, kids who start school with weaker verbal abilities are more prone to experience problems learning literacy skills than their counterparts who have more potent verbal abilities. This includes:
- isolating sounds or developing basic phonemic awareness, such as learning that ‘fr’ is the first unit of sound in ‘frame,’ ‘friend,’ and ‘freeze’ or ‘f’ is the first sound in ‘fish.’
- rhyming, like ‘cat-mat-hat’
- alliteration, such as ‘picture perfect,’ ‘quick question,’ ‘rocky road,’ or ‘money matters.’
As they get involved in sound play, the kids finally learn to divide words into their separate sounds and map them onto printed letters, which lets them start learning to read and write. Though young kids don’t relate all letters to their specific sounds, they can note acceptable phonemes within reading and writing. For instance, ‘fr’ is an acceptable phoneme, while ‘tsw’ isn’t, as there’s no word in English that combines those letters to make a single sound.
Thus, emergent literacy skills include the kids’ knowledge of acceptable phonemes, which boosts their phoneme awareness. This comprehension is extremely vital when they enter school and begin to be trained in reading. It has been observed that kids who perform well on sound awareness tasks become successful writers and readers, while those struggling with these tasks often don’t.
In a classroom that practices emergent curriculum successfully, projects often focus on answering kids’ questions like “Why do different things have different colors?” or “What happens to the water after it’s used to water the plants?” or “What types of homes do animals live in?” After noting kids’ questions, teachers can create projects that help answer those questions.