Emergent literacy: It's all a matter of making connections

The UIC Center for Literacy's new three-year $3.8 million federal grant is introducing Chicago preschoolers to reading in some decidedly unschool-like ways.

Education professor William Teale is the principal investigator for the new grant that will fund the literacy curriculum at seven Catholic Chicago preschools. He was also responsible for the 2006 grant that is funding the literacy curriculum at Passages Charter School.

At Passages, where UIC alumna Nahrain Israel-Tapella teaches, with the assistance of grant-funded UIC literacy coach Laura Abbruzzese, reading is not a subject to be taught. Rather reading is embedded into the many things active preschoolers do. For example:

• Students sign in by writing their names to start the school day.
• They take their places by finding their names taped on the floor.
• Then they play a memory game, finding their assigned letter of the alphabet in pictures of food, animals and other familiar objects.
• Israel-Tapella reads a book to the children, then starts again, pointing out words, teasing out interpretation and aiding comprehension.
• Letters and numbers are on the walls and supply drawers are labeled.

The idea is for the students to make connections — between letters and words; between words and the things they represent; between spoken words and written words; between books and the words and sentences that tell stories. In short, the children are immersed in an incredibly reading-rich environment.

Teale says, "Some children understand the connection between what comes out of their mouths and what's on paper, and a lot of children know a bunch about letters but can't spell properly. With the literacy curriculum, there is much more emphasis on interacting with language and print at a young age. We try to think about some of the ways that you can infuse early literacy into things that kids are doing all day, every day."

View all in the sampling of the articles in the 2008-09 Annual Report.