Child Development: Children Proceed Through Various Stages Essay

Child Development:

Children proceed through various stages of literacy development as they move from reading readiness to fluency and high levels of comprehension. Parents and others can influence literacy development by offering opportunities for literacy experiences. Parents, teachers, siblings, and others can help support early literacy development through various ways including modeling fluency while reading, asking children questions after reading every book, reading aloud with the child on a daily basis, playing with language, and spending time in conversation. Modeling fluency while reading helps to bring excitement for the child to read while playing with language helps children listen to letter sounds and rhymes. One of the stages in literacy development is beginning literacy phase where children demonstrate minimal or no receptive or productive reading and writing skills. During this stage, a child is not confident to build his/her vocabulary and requires time to read and write. Educators can support this stage through oral story retelling, personal dictionaries, word cards, and encouraging drawing.

2 (1). Literacy development also involves reading different types of books that are classified in different genres such as predictable books, folktales, poetry, and counting books. Predictable books have patterned language, predictable storylines, and repetitive phrases that help children anticipate what is coming next. Folktales are books with stories with moral concepts or themes brought by years of oral storytelling while poetry books contain collection of poems that introduce the child to the sounds of language ("Types of Books to Read to Young Children," n.d.). Counting books usually provide fun examples of daily items and objects that contain numbers from 1-10 and introduce language associated with numbers.

2(2). My favorite books/stories from childhood are So Many Bunnies, Sing a Song of Popcorn, and The Very Hungry Caterpillar which fall in alphabet books, poetry, and predictable books respectively.

3. Understanding the differences between sounds and the fact that letters represent varying sounds is a vital part of the early reading process. Early childhood teachers can offer a great advantage to children with opportunities to explore sounds and relationships of letters. Phonological awareness refers to the ability to know that words consist of a variety of sound units while phonemic awareness is an understanding the various means that sounds function in words through dealing with only one aspect of sound. On the other hand, phonics is the first step towards reading because it is an understanding that print letters….....