Beyond Early Literacy: A Balanced Approach to Developing the Whole Child

For early childhood classrooms'”where curriculum is increasingly shaped by standards and teachers are pressed for time'”this book offers a literacy method that goes beyond simply developing language arts skills. Known as the Shared Journal, this process promotes young children's communication and language abilities, their writing skills, a sense of community, a grasp of diverse social and cultural worlds, and an understanding of fairness, history, counting, numeracy, and time. Pairing interactive talk with individual writing in the classroom community, this rich method develops the whole child.Special Features include: A companion website with templates, additional resources, and video clips of in-classroom teaching and examples of exciting ways to use new technologies Children's artifacts, interactive white board strategies, sample lesson plans, and templates throughout the book Strategies and suggestions from classroom teachersFramed by current theory and research, this book also features strategies from on-the-ground teachers who have used the process with their students. This is a fantastic resource for use in early childhood education courses in emergent literacy, language arts, and curriculum.