"REACHING FAMILIES" Title 1 Early Childhood Education Program  Manchester, NH School District

Early Childhood Education Programs

Accomplishments of the Young Child
Home

Three child development partners in "Reaching Families" are the Manchester Developmental Preschool, Easter Seals NH and the Headstart Program.  Each of these early childhood settings offer high quality educational and social intervention and support. Classrooms have carefully crafted interest areas such as dramatic play, block building, woodworking, books, art, table toys and motor activities.  These well organized environments, arranged to promote independence, foster decision making, and encourage initiative and involvement. By providing consistent expectations and schedules for classroom routines such as work time, clean-up time. small group time, outside time, and circle time, children learn to conduct themselves in each activity and when and how to transition between them. Teachers give children a comfortable, secure environment that promotes active learning.  They encourage and support children's actions and language.  They help children make choices and decisions and help them solve their own problems and do things for themselves.  They regularly engage children in conversation, soliciting their responses and focusing on their strengths. Instruction is designed to meet the needs of diverse groups of children through developmentally appropriate programming.  Active and quiet times are offered in the schedule, as well as large and small group activities.  Children's learning in promoted in many ways, such as creative representations (pretend play, model-making, drawing, painting); language and literacy; social relations; movement; music; classification (arranging objects in order or patterns - such as color or size - and describing their relationship, such as biggest to smallest; numbers ( counting and relationships - such as more, fewer, the same); space (experiencing and describing position, direction, and distances in the classroom and building); and time ( concept of time and sequence of events). These early childhood programs are important resources in promoting literacy through enhancing the acquisition of rich language and beginning literacy concepts and skills.  They help your children develop knowledge, interest and understandings that will allow them to flourish in elementary school and beyond.

back to top

Children engaged in language and literacy activities appear playful and exploratory, although in fact they are hard at work as scholars of language and literacy!  Sets of accomplishments that successful learners are likely to exhibit during the preschool years are shown below, as published in Preventing Reading Difficulties In Young Children (National Academy Press 1998).  It captures many highlights in the course of literacy acquisition.  Of course, the timing of these accomplishments will depend of the maturational and experiential differences between children.

Birth to Three Year Old Accomplishments

• Recognizes specific books by cover
• Pretends to read books
• Understands that books are handled in particular ways
• Enters into a book-sharing routine
• Vocalization in crib gives way to enjoyment of rhyming language and nonsense word-play
• Labels objects in books
• comments on characters in books 
• Looks at picture in book and realizes it is a symbol for real object
• Listens to stories
• Requests / commands adults to read or write
• May begin attending to specific print, such as letters in name
• Uses increasingly purposeful scribbling
• Occasionally seems to distinguish between writing and drawing
• Produces some letter-like forms and scribbles some features of writing
  •  

Three to Four Year Old Accomplishments

•  
• Knows that alphabet letters are a special category of visual graphics
• Recognizes print in the local environment
• Knows that it is the print that is read in stories
• Understands that different text forms are used for different functions of print (e.g., a list of groceries is different from the list on a menu)
• Pays attention to separable and repeating sounds in language (e.g., Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater)
• Uses new vocabulary in own speech
• Understands and follows oral directions
• Is sensitive to some sequence of evens in stories
• Shows an interest in books and reading
• Connects information and events in stories to real life experiences
• Demonstrates understanding of story being told with questions and comments
• Displays reading and writing attempts, calling attention to self: (e.g., "Look at my story")
• Can identify about 10 alphabet letters, especially those from own name
• Writes (scribbles) message as part of playful activity
• May begin to attend to beginning or rhyming sounds in words

back to top