Coach's
Column

Our team of Early Childhood Education Coaches are here to help you concentrate on child engagement and work as a collaborative team to enhance your practice. We continue to work on ways in which to create child led activities, be flexible in our plans within those activities, and make an effort to emphasize children’s interests which facilitates learning. We are on hand to help demonstrate and model best practices in early childhood education and support you in your classrooms.

Over the last few weeks, our technical assistance has emphasized key take aways from our recent training with Alan Guttman. We had multiple interactions on the importance of play and engagement in learning. We also discussed developmentally appropriate emergent literacy and nurturing pre-reading and pre-writing in early childhood education. 

As we continue to move through our fall season, I wanted to include more in depth conversations on emergent literacy activities for preschoolers and how to boost early literacy and writing in young children.

Are you aware of some of these stunning child literacy statistics?  

• How incredible is it that in the first three years, infants and toddlers begin acquiring the first of thousands of words they will use throughout their lives?

• With quality early language acquisition, by age five, a child is capable of learning up to 2,000 vocabulary words.

Remember, emergent literacy takes place within the child. It is a gradual process that takes place over time. Literacy develops from real life situations in which children are provided many opportunities to see how reading and writing are useful and meaningful within those experiences.

When thinking about emergent literacy and writing, how can we look at our learning centers and add meaningful writing materials and literacy props for our early learners? 

Let’s take a deeper look at some of the stages of emergent writing. Pay special attention to the stage, description and example of what emergent writing looks like as it progresses from drawing all the way through to conventional spelling and sentence writing. 

To learn more about promoting preschoolers’ emergent writing, learning centers, and books that promote writing; click on this NAEYC link: Emergent Writing

I am looking forward to hearing more success stories of how you have used our follow up technical assistance materials and see how your students have responded to those resources. If any of you need additional assistance in implementing, I am available for you in enhancing your practice.

It’s going to be a wonderful and interactive time at our next professional development day. We welcome Dr. Dana Winters from the Fred Rogers Institute as she presents “Simple Interactions” on Saturday February 11th 2023. Just a friendly reminder, the workshop will be hosted at Indian River State College Muller Campus, Richardson Center. Together we will gain an deeper understanding of the role of interactions in human development; identify ways that human interactions can be encouraged across all levels of a system; and apply the conceptual foundation of developmental relationships to the everyday practice of supporting the learning and growing of children, families, and colleagues. I can’t wait to see you all there.

I thank you for your dedication and willingness to pour into the next generation through education as we elevate and promote the highest quality early childhood development and education in Indian River County.