Beyond Early Literacy

Book excerpt: For early childhood classrooms – where curriculum is increasingly shaped by standards and teachers are pressed for time – Beyond Early Literacy offers a literacy method that goes beyond simply developing language arts skills. Known as Shared Journal, this process promotes young children’s learning across content areas – including their communication and language abilities, writing skills, sense of community, grasp of diverse social and cultural worlds, and understanding of history, counting, numeracy, and time. Pairing interactive talk with individual writing in the classroom community, this rich method develops the whole child. Special features include: sample lesson plans, rubrics, and templates throughout the book children’s artifacts, including examples of oral and written work teacher accounts examining the use of Shared Journal in the classroom, including strategies and suggestions a Companion Website with templates, additional resources, and video clips of in-classroom teaching and examples of exciting ways to use new technologies. This two-part book is first framed by current theory and research about children’s cognitive, language, and literacy development, and an extensive body of research and case studies on the efficacy of the method. The second part features strategies from on-the-ground teachers who have used the process with their students and explores how Shared Journal can be used with new technologies, can meet standards, and can be appropriate for diverse populations of children. This is a fantastic resource for use in early childhood education courses in emergent literacy, language arts, and curriculum.