Kindergarten: A Teacher, Her Students, and a Year of Learning

by Diamond, Julie

  Sam’s evaluation process was not complete until the spring. The question remained: how could the classroom environment be better adapted to his language needs? I thought about what his mother had told me about his previous language experiences. Language growth is spurred by the intensity of children’s desire to communicate. Children who are energetically engaged with others use language constantly to mediate play. I listen to children in the playground as I babysit for my four-year-old granddaughter: “You mean ev-ry-thing to me!” one child shouts, and another, “You can’t catch me!” The language is ritualized and repetitive, but because play is innately variable, involving constantly shifting situations and a shifting cast of other children, language develops alongside play. Perhaps Sam missed out on this daily use of language as a social tool.

  Viewing Sam’s language as part of the way he is in the world, my aim was to enlarge his classroom role. In the words of Lillian Weber, I wanted him to expand his “use [of] language in the school, working at different things, explaining [his] work, being listened to.”10 Weber, a New York City educator, was pivotal in the 1960s and 1970s in bringing to Americans’ attention the reforms in British schools. In “Comments on Language by a Silent Child,” she analyzes the home and school environment in relation to language acquisition. Her picture of language use is colored by her memories of her own childhood language use—and by her sympathy for children as they take in, and later wield, the words that are, as Weber puts it, a feature of the “human context we share.” Language, she writes, “occurs around an object”: “speech clots out like cream in clumps around a context.” 11 Weber sees young children’s language as an inseparable part of their ongoing lives. In learning language, she writes, a child brings “all the drama of his existence.”12

  Weber advises teachers to work in ways consistent with children’s existing language uses, consistent with what the child has already achieved: otherwise, “we may actually be cutting across the path of their development, instead of using it.” 13 When differences exist between school language uses and the language used in the family, it is especially necessary for teachers to help children develop an inclusive framework, a framework of common meanings, and also to help them build “diversified” language, which includes “higher level language, lower level language, street language, love language, this kind of language, that kind of language.”14

  To help Sam, I needed to see purpose in his behavior and enlarge my definition of “language”—to read meaning in his actions and insert myself in those actions, so that we could add spoken language as a functional accompaniment. It’s the role I played in the description earlier: I sat with him as he worked and asked him what he was doing. I extended his play by suggesting we use heavy paper to make the guards stand. Through our work together, language “clots out.” Just as Sam built a paper bridge, I made a bridge to more explicit, expanded language use. What was initially implicit for him became public, first between the two of us, and later, between him and others. In January, when we were talking about babies, Sam jumped into the discussion: Today, Sam talked about Vanessa’s little brother and said, When he’s five, you’ll be ten! I said, Yes, and when he’s ten.... He added something else about getting bigger and growing.

  Sam’s evaluation was complete in the spring: he did just well enough not to qualify for services. By the end of the year, he made relevant comments more frequently. He could read the names of the other children in the class. He was a master cleaner-upper, highly organized, expert in his knowledge of the room and of where everything went. Yet he continued to seem out of it at times, and to have difficulty processing talk addressed to the class as a whole. Although he knew the alphabet, he wrote only with adult help in sounding out words. In first grade, Sam was in an adjacent classroom, and I informally followed his progress. The greater demands placed on him in first grade to process verbal directions made his weakness in this area stand out. His first-grade teacher referred him again. This second evaluation indicated a language processing disability, and Sam received services.

  However, whether or not children have shown evidence of a language disability, teachers must plan for children whose language use is of concern, and must ensure that the classroom environment fosters language growth. We listen actively to what a child seems to be saying. Our responsibility—to gain children’s trust in our listening—remains even when their language facility is excellent. When Adam asked me, “Are there really powers?” he trusted me to listen to his question and take it seriously. When Raquel whispered, before she shared her journal, “Will you help me read the words?” she knew I’d whisper my reply. In teaching young children, we should keep in mind two central uses of literacy: helping them to know the world and to make themselves known.

  6

  The Uses of Literacy: Reading and Writing

  Names and Other Words

  The words they choose come out of months of building castles in the block area, drawing princess after princess. The words are appropriated by individuals from the culture of the class. You have to create the culture, as we have begun to do, through experience, and descriptions of experience. This is knowledge about a way of living, showing children that they can name anything, that there’s nothing they can’t look at and think about.

  Teacher, the best-known book by New Zealand teacher and writer Sylvia Ashton-Warner, describes the use of a “key” or “organic vocabulary” to teach reading and writing. Every morning, the children asked for words, from jet to house to bomb! The words, which Ashton-Warner wrote on heavy paper, became the first words children learned to read and write. Ashton-Warner denies she was doing anything new, citing Egyptian hieroglyphics, which she calls one-word sentences, and Helen Keller’s first word, water, which she says was a one-word book.1 (The educator Paolo Freire utilized a similar technique to teach reading to adults. In Chile, he had peasants write words with their tools “on the dirt roads where they were working.”) 2 “First words,” Ashton-Warner writes, “must have an intense meaning.”3

  Children can collect words, just as they collect other things. Some children, of course, come to school knowing how to read and write a few words, but in my classroom, the first written words children officially meet are names—their own and each others’. This begins on the first day of school, as I hold up the name cards. Reading these cards becomes a morning routine. When we take attendance in the fall, the name cards provide countless reading lessons: We read the name cards, which they are becoming adept at. They find similarities—visual and auditory: Mark and Marcus, Rosie and Francie and Jamie. It is a way of playing with names, with sounds, just as the art work is a way of playing with shapes.

  Their interest in each other moves naturally into informal study of these words. As we talk about the names, I introduce or reinforce knowledge of letters and sounds. The children comment on names with the same letter (“I have an a in my name, too”); they compare long and short names. We look at the placement of letters (“Marcus’s m is the first letter of his name, Adam’s m is the last letter”). Soon, they begin to read and write each other’s names. Their friends’ names are the first that they read and write; the work of reading and writing occurs in the context of these new relationships.

  The children write list after list of names, for all sorts of reasons, taking the plastic can of name cards and copying the names with great care. They stick magnetic letters on a board to match the letters on the cards; they print names using letter stamps. I initiate some of these activities, but others are invented by the children: Denay makes her list of children in the Click Club, and ambitious Lila makes her own set of name cards. In the late fall, as children begin to wear winter coats and need help zipping, two children survey everyone, using a class list on a clipboard, and then make a chart, Who Can Zip? They write the names and add the children’s xeroxed photographs; as more children learn to zip, their names and photos are added. The chart is consulted at the end of the day when children need help zipping. Othe
r surveys and graphs inevitably follow: Who can tie shoes? Who lost a tooth? How many letters in your name? What is your favorite letter?

  Writing children’s names

  Photo by Julie Diamond

  Word cards are used to label class collections of leaves, seeds, and nuts. When we study the family, we need family words. One small basket holds blank index cards. Some other years, in the spring, I followed Ashton-Warner’s example by giving out word cards, which the children kept in shoe boxes. Once a week, children could get new words if they could read their old words. They would practice, reading their words to each other. One year, we stuck the words up on the closet doors; each child had one section of a door. The children liked it, but the cards kept ending up on the floor, like snow. Still, I liked the idea of all these words up and visible: castle, dragon, robot, princess, tiger, mom, love. They borrowed words from each other when they wanted to spell something; the words were a cross-section of the class culture.

  These are their words; the children chose them, and I made no judgments. In the first-grade classrooms, “word wall” words come from the literacy materials that the school uses; thus the words are the same from room to room, except for the names of the children in the class. Visiting a first-grade classroom, I notice that the word mom is included, but not dad, and I ask about it. The teacher replies that she was concerned about the feelings of children in her class who lived with single mothers. But what is the message about children’s ability to acknowledge experience? What if a child wanted to write “I miss my dad”? And what’s the point of word lists if words aren’t generated by children in the class, if the words don’t reflect their lives? For Ashton-Warner, word cards were a sign of her faith in children’s wish to represent things and feelings that had meaning.

  When reading begins with real things, children are more likely to remember the words, because of their associations with what the words represent. I engineer different contexts in which children can see and hear these words. Once a week, we do a secret code word. Children use a “secret code” sheet, on which each alphabet letter is next to a corresponding number (A—1, B—2, etc.). They copy that week’s secret code numbers and figure out the word. Here, too, I start with children’s names, because these are so familiar, and then move on to other words: Today our secret code words were shark and dolphin. Vanessa brought up her paper with shark on it but said dolphin. I said, Well, does it begin with a D? Certain words—now, for this group, not only love, mom, me, but shark, dolphin—are part of the environment; they’ve been given a context. These are words they hear and see, that are needed for something they are doing, words in a favorite song or poem, or words connected with an activity or trip. Each different context adds a layer of meaning, adds hooks to memory, until a child says, “I know that word.”

  Writing on the message board

  Photo by Julie Diamond

  My job is to introduce children to reading, not to teach it. I encourage the acquisition of reading and writing, but I don’t push; I’ve seen too many children who weren’t ready to read, pushed by parents or academically oriented preschools, who’ve ended up bored with books. But I use a variety of written texts to help children move toward reading. On the morning message, children see the same words daily (today, school, is), and after reading the message, children take turns locating and circling specific words. By the spring, I expect children to read a number of these words, and I begin to omit some letters or words for children to fill in. They may add sentences to the message about birthdays or wiggly teeth. Some mornings, if I haven’t written the message, children volunteer to write the entire message. Other written material—charts, signs, poems, chants, songs, labels, messages for holiday cards, books—help children gain confidence in their ability to recognize certain important words.

  In the spring, I provide baskets of beginning readers, at various levels of difficulty. (Teachers can also write, as Ashton-Warner did, simple readers about the children in the class.) At quiet reading time, I sit with an individual or two or three children, and we read these books, working together to figure out new words. I note the strategies of individuals: Do they look at the pictures when they’re stuck? Do their guesses make sense? Do their guesses reflect sounds associated with the letters in the text?

  My central goal in all these activities is for children to gain confidence. I want them to feel confident in their ability to read some words and in their ability to guess thoughtfully at unknown words. Above all, I want them to feel that in the classroom world, written text is meaningful.

  Beginning Where They Are

  Yesterday, when they were writing, Mark suggested to Adam that he copy a word he needed from the morning message. Adam: No, I want to sound it out.

  In the fall, children begin to write immediately. I give them writing folders, and I tell them writing is about something. Children’s writing, especially in the fall, may consist of drawings, plus random letters that convey spoken words or sentences. As they begin to label their drawings, they utilize letters that correspond to sounds in the words: m for me. Children who enter school with little free-drawing experience need time to explore their own ability to be inventive, to make decisions about topics, and to concentrate on the act of writing—that is, making marks. They may—to a teacher’s dismay—draw house after house after house, or make designs. But children see each others’ drawings—of themselves, dogs, cats, and spiders—and after a while get the idea. When teachers value children’s efforts at these initial levels, and children don’t feel rushed through this period, subsequent efforts will be significantly richer.

  The teacher’s role is crucial and complex. Through conversations, teachers help children define topics. They ensure that work is regularly shared, so that children are exposed to different writing possibilities. As noted earlier, they see that classroom organization and routines provide the infrastructure to support writing (e.g., easy access to materials for writing, baskets or files to save ongoing work, routines for talking about work, display space for work).

  Yet teachers should not impose writing. When writing is imposed, when it occurs outside of authentic contexts, disconnected from children’s real experiences and purposes, when it is a product of pressure on teachers to follow units of instruction and of pressure on children to write during daily writing periods, children’s long-term interest in and commitment to writing may be sapped.

  I believe that teachers should not be dogmatic about young children’s writing, and should feel free to judge whether writing down children’s statements from dictation would help them develop their ideas. When rigid instructional methods preclude dictation and children are expected to depend solely on their own skills, their ability to expand on thoughts and tell long, complicated stories may be shortchanged. At times, dictation should be the primary method of recording communication. For example, when children engage in dramatic play, the teacher’s recording of the story can lead to numerous other activities: the story can be read to the class, subsequently acted out, or used for a book that children illustrate. (Whenever I read one of Vivian Paley’s books, I’m reminded of how powerful a tool dictation can be.) Because children are at different levels of competence in writing, and approach it in individual ways, we must encourage a variety of approaches to recording.

  Teachers should be deliberate in their teaching of skills and conventions as these are appropriate, not according to the timetable of a commercial guide; teachers should always judge the level of children’s existing understanding and experience. Explicit instruction in writing is meaningful for young children when the piece of instruction matches what a child actively needs to know. The task for teachers is to figure out what children will find useful at a particular moment and find ways to provide it. Courtney Cazden, a Harvard educator who has focused on classroom language use, describes the “instructional detour” that aids the learning of specific features of language use.4 She warns that, without instruction, children’s progress may be
stymied, but she also argues that the primary context for language learning must remain the child’s desire to “talk and read and write about the world.” 5 One example of this sort of instructional detour: when Peter—who likes sounding out words—wants to write a word with an er sound, I point to his name: “There’s the er sound!”

  Young children who come to kindergarten without knowledge of letters or sounds benefit from exposure to the alphabet and from involvement in activities that aid acquisition of letter names and reinforce letter-sound association. But while I believe instruction should be focused and explicit, it also should not replace children’s experiential learning (building with blocks, painting, dramatic play). It should utilize what children already know and should maximize active rather than mechanical learning processes. Children can use plastic or rubber alphabet letters and put them in sequence. They can make their own alphabet cards, alphabet book, or wall alphabet in a variety of ways; they can print their own alphabets using letter stamps or write individual letters that they glue in order onto strips of paper. They can form alphabet letters with their hands or bodies, which the teacher photographs. They can identify alphabet letters in the environment. As noted earlier, name cards provide endless ways to reinforce knowledge of alphabet letters. For example, children can organize the name cards to make columns of the names that begin with or include a given letter, and then write those names (creating, in effect, a simple graph). There are wonderful alphabet books that should be a part of every early-childhood classroom library, e.g., with photographs of letters found on city streets. As children’s knowledge of letter names increases, letter-sound activities become more meaningful. Classes can make alphabet books or wall exhibits of things that begin with each letter, drawing objects (using commercial alphabet books and picture dictionaries) or bringing objects from home, which the teacher then photographs or which they themselves draw.