The Literacy Foundation

     Chapter 3 of "Classrooms That Work" focuses on building the literacy foundation. I agree with the fact that the chapter states that when we are asked when we learned to read our answers mostly reflect our experiences in kindergarten and first grade. However, I found it really interesting that the chapter puts into perspective that learning begins much earlier than that. It is important to realize that children want to do everything that adults can do. If you remember this key point then it will make perfect sense to you that if children grow up in homes where adults read and write, they will want to read and write too. Not only is it important to read to children starting at young ages, but it is also important to encourage early attempts at writing. 
     I really enjoyed all the examples this chapter provided on different ways to build your students' foundation of literacy. Not only were all of these activities interactive and easy, they also took part in making each student feel special which encourages them to have positive feelings about reading and writing. My favorite example provided was the "special child' activity. With this activity, you build the foundation of literacy with each day providing a new example just by using the names of the students in your classroom. As a future teacher, I found all these examples extremely useful and will carry these on into my own classroom. 
     Overall, this chapter helps to tie into the article "The Jones Family's Culture of Literacy" by providing an example of how parental interaction with their children at young ages creates a firm foundation for learning. The article states, "children enter schools with a legacy of meaning about literacy and educational achievement that is not easily transformed." This was interesting to me because it highlights the importance of the roles that parents play in their children's life. My favorite part about this article is that through investigating the value of literacy in the Jones family you get to see all the different ways that literacy was used in their day-to-day life. It was interesting to me to see how large of a role literacy does play and how as parents and teachers we can highlight these roles and integrate them into our teaching. 
     Do you think that parental involvement at a young age significantly helps to build children's       literacy foundation?
     What do you think can be done for students who don't have a literacy background upon entering school?

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This website provides a fun and interactive game called the Chute Shuffle that helps to teach many of the concepts of literacy foundation. For example you can build sentences that focus only on the "sh" sound and have your students pick out what words in the sentence have the "sh" sound.