TTI Teachers and Teaching Initiative

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This module provides strategies for using a multifaceted approach to teaching literacy. It is as helpful to the classroom teacher as to district level leaders who are developing a school-wide reading program. Most of the material will not be new to experienced teachers, and many educators will already be using some of these strategies. This module is, perhaps, a reminder of how important it is to support a literacy program that uses many and varied strategies in an effort to reach all learners.

Young children love to communicate. However, as toddlers and pre-school children, it is often difficult to keep them quiet. Children need to learn to both receive messages as well as send them. Communication, through language, needs to be experienced in a number of ways.

An effective literacy program can be created in the classroom to foster language development. Characteristics of an effective literacy program include:

a focus on students’ learning styles
visuals of reading and writing displayed everywhere in the school
the opportunity to hear language spoken well on a regular basis
adults regularly seen to be reading and writing
skilled instruction in reading that is tailored to an individual student’s reading styles
opportunities for everyone to read and write in every subject area
opportunities to share original students’ work
access to good literature and the celebration of literacy.

This module will address the reading environment of an effective literacy program. It starts by discussing various approaches to teaching students to read, but then focuses on the ways that lead teachers can encourage and assist development of a rich and exciting reading environment in their classrooms.

Start the module: Chapter 1: Building an Effective Literacy Program