Blog 2

My topic is language literacy. My three sub topics are language literacy, promoting literacy, and early intervention for literacy. This teacher has influenced me to want to know more about how our children learn and develop their literacy throughout the years.

For my field observations, I chose an infant and toddler classroom. The teacher is a woman who has been working in the filed for five years. For the last two years, she has been an infant/toddler teacher.
 For the past two weeks, I have been going to her classroom in the morning after breakfast. She is a really great advocate for literacy. During my observations, I asked her what she does to promote literacy. She responded by saying she talks, sings, and reads to the students in her class. For example, when she was about to change one of her students, she explained to the child what she was going to do as they were walking to the changing table. Then, while she was changing the child she kept the child informed about what she was doing to them. Another great example of her promoting literacy is when the children would babble or say something that nobody could understand, she would respond back to them with real words.

A special experience I took from these observations was seeing one of her children who didn’t have any verbal language use sign language. She advised me that she teaches her students sign language because she knows that some of them are not verbal and better at pointing and gesturing what they want. This was so special to me because I had never seen children so young know how to communicate with sign language. This taught me that she really did teach her students and that they were really learning from her.

Another insight I gained from these observations was that infants from six weeks and up can be taught literacy. Everything they do is surrounded around literacy. I think everybody needs to have an experience with infants to see how the older children gain their knowledge. This goes to show that children start learning from birth. Alos, going into her classroom to observe ha staught me that children are like sponges and pick up everything if it is taught the right way.