Teach English in LiuzhuAng Zhen - Yancheng Shi

Every good teacher can teach the best that he or she could be. We aim to help every child to develop their highest potential skills. One of the best ways is to build their basic foundation in reading, writing and speaking. If every teacher has the goal that no one will leave behind, I assure you that every one of them will be successful in every endeavor they will face. What is literacy? Literacy for me means the ability to read, it is not just an academic skill but a multifaceted ability with psychological, social, and linguistic components. Literacy is one of my passions to develop in my teaching career. I experienced and witnessed that love to read helps the child to be creative, passionate and imaginative However, many arguments in early childhood education about when to start to teach reading. Some experts say as early as possible however, some say at a later age. I believe that children's minds never put to overwork if we know to balance their interests and capabilities. Although most children will not learn reading fluency until elementary school but they pick up pre-literacy skills from infancy onward. Children who read an early age and learn basic reading skills before they go to pre-school or kindergarten have a more positive impact on the word-picture association. According to Dr. Nell Duke, early education professor at the University of Michigan, “that even when children are in utero… there is a positive memory or association to that particular set of sounds” It starts when the mother reads them while they are still in the womb. It helps the child to grasp the sounds, feelings, and interests of the mother while she is doing any activity that influences the child in the womb. As we noticed that if the mother does not do anything aside from being lonely and experiencing emotional stress, the child has a big chance to have an emotional or behavioral disorder that will affect his or her learning ability. There are always consequences in every action that we do based on our choices. Here are some benefits that the child can get when we start to feed them with a healthy influence of pre-reading -Increased kindergarten readiness, Improved memory, Better listening skills, Stronger sense of curiosity, and a Higher academic gains. Here are the important strategies of the pre-reading skills that help children learn to read in kindergarten: PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS is where the child hears the sound and recognizes that orally spoken words are made up of smaller pieces of sound, such as syllables, initial sound, blending, and phonemes. In their further learning, they will deal with STRESS, RHYTHM, and INTONATION. However, For young learners, they learn to read through play by manipulating the sound in a language. The teacher can start to let the students recognize the alphabet and its sound in the beginning. Example: phonemes - c-a-t syllables - Din-ing LISTENING SKILLS- It is the ability to pay attention to sounds in the environment and the spoken word. The teacher makes activities for students to identify sounds, find the source of a sound and listen to the sound. Identify the difference between each letter sound: Example: /b/ /p/ m/ /n/ /v/ /f/ LEARNING NEW WORDS- when the child started to know and learn about the sounds of the letters it is easy to introduce short words like CVC (consonant vowel consonant) words. Example: b-a-t , m-a-t. PRINT RECOGNITION- it is important to let the children know about the print because it carries a message. The printed words are composed of letters and that letters create sounds that heard in a spoken word. The role of the teacher here is to let the students have a constant exposure to the words. The words that they see or encounter every day in reading books, labels, signage, etc. BLENDING SOUNDS TO COMPEX WORDS (like “read” + “ing” = reading)- When the students are already ready for reading the teacher can start to teach blending. Blending refers to joining the beginning of one word and the end of another to make a new word with a new meaning including the CVC, consonant clusters, and digraphs Teaching the child to read is fun when the teacher knows how to create activities about reading. It is not only the knowledge but the skills, ability, and hard work are vital. Another important thing to learn about teaching literacy is that reading, writing, and speaking are inseparable.