Useful articles
Useful Articles
Stages of Literacy Development
All children come to school with diverse life experiences,language skills, cultural backgrounds,and literacy understandings. As you listen to the voices of children as they speak, read, and write, you learn about their backgrounds.
You learn about children as you use the modeled, shared, guided and independent instructional approaches to teach reading and writing.
Instruction taps into children’s prior knowledge and shows you how to effectively observe and assess their literacy development.
"Our goal as teachers is to understand and extend the prior knowledge of our children, no matter what their age or experience.A guideline for instruction is to be sure that your teaching first engages children in showing, telling, and demonstrating what they know."
Elizabeth Sulzby
Emergent, Early, and Fluency
The stages of literacy development,which describe what children know and do as they grow as readers,have been broadly defined as the emergent stage, early stage, and fluency stage.
Rigby Literacy supports teachers as they work with emergent,early,and fluency readers and writers by providing developmentally appropriate books and lesson plans written to match the developmental characteristics of children at each level.
Emergent Stage
- Emergent readers begin to behave like readers and understand that print carries a message.
- They enjoy listening to stories and show a real interest in books and environmental print.
- Emergent readers are just beginning to learn about concepts of print.
Rigby Literacy honors the emergent child’s need to listen and respond. During shared reading,where children read together with the teacher, children develop confidence that they can read. As their concepts of print develop further, children then advance to guided reading,where they are guided by the teacher as they begin to read books with greater independence.
"Emergent readers are learning how books work. Early readers are learning how words work. Fluent readers are learning how words and books work in many ways."
Margaret Mooney
Early Stage
- Early readers begin to improve and extend their existing range of skills.
- They exhibit a greater confidence as readers and enjoy listening to longer and more complex stories.
- Early readers respond to meaning in text by relating to prior experience for deeper meaning.
Rigby Literacy addresses the development of early readers by “having all children engaged in reading and writing activities that honor children’s individual levels” and by “applying gentle nudges and demonstrations”
(Sulzby)
Within the lesson plans, you will be guided as you explicitly teach appropriate literacy skills and comprehension strategies. Advancing levels of literacy skills are embedded within the reading and writing experiences. Longer and gradually more complex Rigby Literacy guided reading books for early readers encourage children to make richer reading and writing connections.
Fluency Stage
- Fluency readers exhibit the behaviors of mature readers.
- They read independently from many genres for a variety of purposes.
- They automatically call on a number of strategies when coping with challenges in text.
- Fluency readers search quickly and flexibly for needed information.
- They read between the lines and draw upon experiences with other books.
- There is more focus at this level on craft and style.
With Rigby Literacy,children will have the opportunity to read different kinds of books for different purposes,all of which are identified in the lesson plans.
As skills and strategies continue to be modeled and taught with the lesson plans,children will become more strategic readers.
Article adapted from Rigby Literacy Teacher's Guide (2000)