Alphantastic Learning!

Dr. Shayne Piasta shares some of her research in a podcast called “Alphabet Learning and Early Literacy,” where her focus is on what she's discovered about how alphabet instruction can be used in conjunction with phonological awareness instruction and other forms of early literacy education in order to maximize the impact of students' time spent in these types of instructional settings.  Basically, she points out that when we make explicit the reading process we're going through, it helps the children with whom we're reading.  Specifically, she states that when parents point out individual sounds/letters as they’re reading and talk about their importance to the outcome of what’s on the page, it's particularly helpful for young children, especially when done in conjunction with discussions about the meaning of what's happening in the story.  Piasta's recommendation lines up nicely with what Catherine Compton-Lilly says in her article "'Sounding Out':  A Pervasive Cultural Model of Reading," where she highlights the popularity of "sound it out" as the fix-all answer for children when they come to a word they don't know, and points out that while even children cite this as the thing to do when they don't know a word, it's not actually that helpful, and it's not the thing that they're really practicing.  She says that strategies like going back and trying again, thinking in your brain, asking a friend for help, trying the first or last letter, looking at the context (pictures, other words), and making sure it makes sense are much more widely used and more helpful for students.

So what does this mean practically for those of us who are blessed to work with prephonemic learners?  It means being aware of our own reading process and being able and willing to translate our thoughts and strategies into explanations for the children around us.  Whether we're cooking together from a recipe, reading a bedtime story, or teaching a lesson, we can use the opportunities presented to point out that the pictures help us know what's going on, that the two slanted lines with a flat line in between is a capital "A" and usually says /ā/ or /ă/, or that sometimes we have to go back and re-read something to get the meaning or the pronunciation down.

All the wonderful alphabet books available are a great way to do this, like Stephen T. Johnson's Alphabet City or Suse MacDonald's Alphabatics, both of which are Caldecott Honor Books.  Getting sensory learners involved using shaving cream, finger paints, rice, sand or something similar in which to draw letters is a fun break from traditional worksheets, and jell-o letters are a tasty alternative.  And while not all poses are realistic for young kids--or, let's face it, me--to do, alphabet yoga is another fun way to get kids to connect with letters.

So on the never-ending journey to get kids to engage with learning and enjoy reading, help them to see the alphabet as a fun, friendly thing that will help them to "go off to Great Places," in the words of Dr. Seuss.