Read Aloud and the Calendar/Daily Routine

Literacy drives education and integration into our society. Without literacy children lack the most basic of survival skills in our modern world. In my dyad placement, I am observing literacy training in two languages. Our school has a dual language program in which almost half of the students are in a dual language classroom each year (K-6). For the first grade class I am observing, we speak Spanish until lunch and then speak English the last half of the day. That being the case, children are required to have two literacy classes. The most basic form of literacy training is read aloud. Students gather at the big carpet and interact with the teacher as she reads a short book twice each day. Each read aloud follows the structure which Mason enumerated through the observations in their paper. The teacher stops to explain unfamiliar or key words. She stops and asks children to predict what will happen based on the pictures. She also stops to hear connections. The read aloud models literacy, creates excitement, and focuses attention.

Another fascinating literacy tool is the calendar or daily routine activity. In this simple activity, which can be customized in a myriad of ways, children learn literacy across many daily domains. The domains include the following: time and date, counting, weather, money, clothing, emotions, or any other domain a teacher wishes to interject. The driving principles are repetition, sight words, visual-audible-spoken reinforcement, and use of technology. In our class, the teacher uses a smart board with several pages which are used every day. The kids say the date and day of the week. They count the number of days they have been in school. They work on counting by fives and ones. They see the counting represented by money (pennies). Lastly, they count using their fingers which helps reinforce the lesson with physical action. One of the best observations I had was totally unplanned. The teacher tried using a different program for the smart board presentation. A student (first grader) had to show her how to advance the pages.