We Love Literacy!
September is National Literacy Month, and around our ECS campus you will always find students practicing the skills necessary for literacy. Literacy is the ability to read, write, speak, and listen in a way that lets us communicate effectively and make sense of the world. Pop into one of our preschool classrooms to find teachers reading a picture book to students as they listen with rapt attention at their spot on the carpet. Step into our elementary classrooms and you will find our younger students working on literacy skills such as speaking the correct sounds for letters or letter combinations, or playing matching games to pair a letter with a picture of an object that starts with that letter/sound. In other classrooms you will observe students choosing and discussing books together during paired reading opportunities and during small group reading with their teachers around a table. In our older elementary classrooms students have plenty of opportunities to share book reports in front of their peers in creative and colorful ways. Our teachers know how important it is to teach and practice literacy skills every day, so they work hard at providing creative ways to engage our students in this process. Sometimes that means that students enjoy creating an art project related to a shared story, extending their learning about what was read. Other times you may find students quietly reading their own book selections in a darkened room, armed with the flashlights their teacher handed out to keep the reading environment alive and help ensure reading is fun. Even after September’s emphasis on literacy comes to an end, our continued focus on these skills provides rich opportunities to propel our students’ literacy skills well above grade level by the end of the year.
