READINGS

PARTICIPANTS:

4.1 Critiques other plausible perspectives on early literacy & numeracy awareness & immersion   

What:

The two readings that i have chosen for this week are on literacy and numeracy are called " Moving Past “Right” or “Wrong” Toward a Continuum of Young Children’s Semantic Knowledge."and "Using children's literature to inspire K–8 Pre service teachers' future mathematics pedagogy". which are closely related to how we can make children participate more in literacy and numeracy experience by making them more meaningful and useful for them.

Main Argument:

I see a lot of implication for my learning happening through these two readings the first reading relating to literacy is called Moving Past “Right” or “Wrong” Toward a Continuum of Young Children’s Semantic Knowledge" by Christ (2011)  and it states that vocabulary development is a critical goal for early childhood education. A clear sense of children’s depth of semantic knowledge is necessary in order to plan and evaluate the effectiveness of instruction. This article proposes a continuum of young children’s semantic knowledge that stems from a conceptual analysis of literature across the fields of education, linguistics, and educational psychology. Nineteen categories of children’s word knowledge were identified and grouped into five hierarchically related levels: no understanding, schematically related understanding, contextual understanding, decontextual understanding, and paired understanding.

.The reading suggests that learning and development is most likely to occur when new experiences build on what a child already knows and is able to do and when those learning experiences also entail the child stretching a reasonable amount in acquiring new skills, abilities, or knowledge and to build on children’s knowledge of specific word meanings and that teachers need a valid, reliable, and efficient continuum for assessing the kinds of knowledge children have.

.Without such a continuum, teachers may focus solely on whether words are known or not known rather than consider what depth of knowledge children have acquired. Verhallen and Schoonen (1998) warn that when teachers do not attend to children’s depth of word knowledge the arrears of linguistically less proficient children may go unnoticed, and this poses   undesirable educational risks  and that teachers who are not well served when they are stranded without the resources, tools, and supports necessary to make sound instructional decisions. Therefore, a reliable and valid continuum for analyzing  the depth of children’s vocabulary  knowledge is crucial to inform instructional practices.

The second reading was about numeracy and called" Using children's literature to inspire K–8 pre service teachers' future mathematics pedagogy" by Ward (2005) and it states  that by incorporating children’s literature into the teaching of all content areas, in particular, mathematics, provides  a useful means to capture and engage more students’ attention and that  literature also provide a means for mathematics and language skills to develop simultaneously as children learn to listen, read, write, and talk about mathematics.

It also asserts that integrating literature into the mathematics curriculum provides a natural setting for observing mathematics in the real world, making it come alive and thus conveying real meaning to students.In a similar manner, Richardson (2000) believed that books chosen to read aloud to older students should contain provocative issues and moral dilemmas to stimulate critical thinking and discussion and promote collaborative construction of meaning.

NOW WHAT?

I think that these two readings provide a very valuable insight into how as a teacher we can make children's participation more effective and meaning full as by incorporating children's literature we can make the mathematical experiences more joyful and interesting and also how knowledge about children's earlier semantic knowledge can help  us to be more prepared in efficient as a teacher  and also can help  us to be effective planner in enhancing their knowledge and learning. The first reading on literacy is very useful as it sates that how a teacher should be equipped with the resources  and tools necessary to engage young children which i believe is very important as these tools help teacher to be more efficient in teaching and development of children and also that a teacher should be aware of the vocabulary knowledge of children so that she could be more prepared and aware of the different abilities and learning achievements of children. The other reading on mathematics is really very interesting as it states that a teacher can use literature to engage young children in maths as maths could be very boring and dry at time therefore a teacher can make it more interesting and enjoyable choosing story books that have mathematical concepts to stimulate children's learning.

REFERENCES:

1: Christ, T. (2011). Moving Past “Right” or “Wrong” Toward a Continuum of Young Children’s Semantic Knowledge. Journal of Literacy Research, 43(2), 130-158.

2: Ward, R. A. (2005). Using children's literature to inspire K–8 preservice teachers' future mathematics pedagogy. The Reading Teacher, 59(2), 132-143.