Course : (ESC_347) Written Language in Early Childhood Education
Curriculum : This is a basic, introductory course, concerning the fundamental principles of literacy and written speech and how their didactics is applied in Kindergarten.
It focuses on both the theoretical approaches of linguistic development and literacy and the practices that can reinforce them.
More specifically, the focus is on the development of child language, from birth to primary school, the cognitive and non cognitive proceedures of reading and writing, the emergent literacy and the practices that support it or not.
The final purpose of the course is the students to understand the literacy practices in Kindergarten, the important role of the teachers as a literacy intercessor as well as the importance of developing strong communicative relationships with families and the local community, as far as bilingual children or children with other problems are concerned.
Upon successful completion of this course, students should be able to:
● Report the purposes and the aims of the linguistic education, the reinforcement of communicative skills and the emergent literacy in pre - school education.
● Explain the contribution of family literacy programmes to the reinforcement of the emergent literacy, which are orientated towards different social and cultural contexts.
● Refer and handle the matters of family literacy in a more critical and scientific way and be able to describe the way in which these matters can contribute to the support of communication, language and literacy in a more efficient way.
● Identify and justify the differences between the several literacy practices that apply in Kindergarten and primary school.
● Develop and apply plans in order to develop and evaluate the children’s linguistic skills.
● Explain the contribution of written texts, as well as children’s literature and books of information in children’s linguistic development.
● Organise educational activities, based on current educational proceedures, that support the children’s linguistic development.
● Describe the way in which several educational activities can be used as literacy practices at Kindergarten.
● Organise, document, present and evaluate literacy activities for pre - schoolers, in an efficient way.
Outline : ● Language development and language arts education in Kindergarten.
● The connection between oral and written speech.
● Reading and writing: understanding and producing written texts.
● Emergent and family literacy.
● Literacy practices in early childhood.
● Teaching language and curriculum.
● pre - alphabetical and alphabetical stages of reading and writing.
● Organising spaces in the Kindergarden and supporting operational literacy.
● Organising school’s library - audio library - ebooks.
● Multimodal texts and operational literacy.
● Educational activities for the reinforcement of the transition to elaborated speech.
● Children speaking different languages from the language that the teachers use in Kindergarden.
● Reinforcement of linguistic development through projects.
● Family literacy - Family and teacher cooperation.
● Linguistic skills evaluation.