Question:
Is literacy a prominent feature of your household? In what ways do you subtly encourage (or discourage) literacy at home?
Context:
Books surrounded me as a child and life will not be much different for my daughter in this respect. As anyone who has ever helped me move is acutely aware of, I have pretty much saved every book I have ever owned. It's a great comfort to me to know that I can return to any one of them in the dead of night and be certain of finding the reference I need.
My nearly three-year-old daughter, Solveig, is rather rapidly accumulating a library of her own. We go to the library every week to exchange one stack of books for another, and know most of the bookstores in our area. And, just as I have always done, we refer back to these books when an interesting connection arises.
Literacy isn't just about books, though. It's about meaning and representation. Part of becoming literate is learning to interpret and produce particular forms, such as the poem, the short story, and even directed dialogue. Narrative forms vary from culture to culture, purpose to purpose, but the mark of a good orator, writer, and conversationalist is mastery over particular kinds of valued forms.
Although I work with Solveig on the alphabet and she has already begun to learn to write familiar words like her own name, Mama, and Daddy, the bulk of my efforts are devoted to learning the form of narrative. This includes reading her children's stories and poetry, but because I want her to understand how relevant literacy is to everyday life, we also examine the mundane language of signs and packages, subtitles, websites, magazines, and even stuff that I'm working on at the computer.
What's more fun is the work we do together to create stories and poetry of our own. I started when Solveig was twenty months old by helping her write a poem for Father's Day. First I took an inventory of her spoken vocabulary and saved the list in a simple word document. Then I printed out the list and cut each word out onto a slip of paper. We put the slips into a bowl, and one by one she selected and glued a word onto a small plywood board. When she announced that she was done, we read her "Dada Poem" out loud and then presented the gift to her father.
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