Literacy Development in the Early Years: A Reflection on theorists, methods, and public policy

In this first chapter, the book really talks about how we need to be teaching younger children language arts. It gave a lot of different theorists and how they thought children should learn. I did not completely agree with all of the theorists, but in a way, they each had something right. Teaching children is about mixing and matching different methods and strategies. There is no one right way to learn or teach. It all needs to be integrated. Rousseau and Pestalozzi were right about children needing to discovery and learn on their own. They are curious and need to do some trial and error to learn what it is right. I work in a daycare with 1-2 year-olds. One of the most important activities, they do in there is just explore and try different activities out to learn.  When you are teaching science, you do not just tell the students facts; you have to give them experiments and hands on activities so that they can discover the facts and prove them on their own. You also can just purely let the children grow and expect them to pick it all up as they go. You need to facilitate some learning. Give them items to play with that will help them learn like Froebel told us. In the daycare I work at, they have books for children to look at and different shapes they can use to discover with. This also links to Montessori since she wanted students to have tools to learn how to do certain things. All the theorists together combined can help a child learn best. They need many different styles to learn all they need to know. There were two theorists that I related with the most though, Vygotsky and Dewey. I believe that everything you do in the classroom needs to be centered on the children’s interests and needs like Dewey. You need to captivate them with their interests linked to what they need to learn. I also really like integrating subject areas. The lessons I always remembered most were ones that related directly to daily life and had different subjects linked to them. Isn’t that how most of us are? The hands-on, multi-subject activities you do in school truly stick to you. Vygotsky was the other theorist that I connected most with. I think that you have to let the students understand the subject on their own, but lead them their through scaffolding. After discussing the different theories, the book gave us a few ways to teach language arts. I related to each of the different ways of learning and could see their pros and cons. Like when they discussed emergent literacy and how there are steps to being able to read, I remember my 4-year-old niece reading me a story just by looking at the pictures in the book. Also when the book discussed constructivism and whole language instruction, it talked about how there would be main themes to connect different subjects and in a kindergarten classroom I volunteered at in high school, they had different themes every few weeks to keep all the subjects integrated and connected. So together, these different methods could work well. So that is why I agree that the Balanced Comprehensive Approach works best. You need to use each the methods to help children learn. Every child is different and learns a certain way so we must use all styles and methods to help every individual child succeed. Finally, the book discussed the different public policy that has affected. I feel like that some things can help us improve our education system, but I think that testing is taking the emphasis off of what is truly important, which is the students becoming the best they can be not the best test-taker.