Reading & Writing (Alphabetic & Symbolic Literacy) Students begin their writing journey with drawing, letter formation, and formatting. They need to practice the writing process, including pre-writing (brainstorming), drafting (outlining, attending to purpose and audience), revising (organizing), editing (spelling, grammar, diction, syntax), and publishing (sharing with an authentic audience).
Foundational reading skills include phonics, phonemic awareness, vocabulary development, fluency, and comprehension. Comprehension includes the ability to question, predict, summarize, make connections (to oneself, to the world, and to other texts), infer, monitor and fix, and visualize. According to Louise Rosenblatt, reading may be aesthetic, in which readers explore the text and their experience of it, or efferent, in which readers focus on taking information away from the text. Close reading is a strategy to enable readers to critically analyse and do justice to a text. Reading involves breaking the code, making meaning, using texts and analysing texts (Luke & Freebody, ctd. in McDowell "Literacy teaching and learning for the 21st century" 48).
Even on camping trips, you will find me reading and writing in my journal!
Speaking & Listening (Oral/Aural Literacy) Students need to develop phonemic and phonological awareness for basic reading and listening, but should also acquire an ear for tone, rhythm, rhyme, pitch, and other aural features that communicate meaning. It's important for students to be able to decode music and speech in a variety of contexts, but also to develop an attentiveness to sounds in their environment. They should also be able to use speech and music effectively to communicate meaning and move their audience.
My mother-in-law had a hillbilly party for her 50th, and a talent show to boot. I sang Man of Constant Sorrows with my husband and brother-in-law, and read a passage from John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.
Art attack! On vacation in Vernon, my husband and I stopped by a gallery to make some art using the materials they had available for free.
Viewing & Representing (Visual, Tactile, & Kinaesthetic Literacy) To decode and encode visual texts, students need to be familiar with the elements of art (shape, line, colour, texture, perception and space), the principles of design (tone, rhythm, repetition, scale and proportion, pitch, dominance, composition, and pattern). They need to understand the relationship between print and visual text in graphic texts as well as the role of the peritext and metatext. They should also apply such skills to understand and create material culture (objects and architecture). Furthermore, students should understand the body as a carrier of meaning via performance arts.