Literacy in the Early Years – 1

Description

Language is one of the most crucial tools that children acquire during the early years, one that is essential for cognitive development, reading achievement, and overall success in life as well as academics, Language is also critical for forging social relations, it also allows people to share knowledge. Language and literacy have 4 strands they are listening, speaking, reading and writing

The first 2 strands have more to do with oral communication and the next two that is reading and writing have more to do with print and in the English language it has to do with decoding the alphabetic code or symbols.

The human brain is hard-wired to learn language, and even though we all learn and acquire language in the early years there are differences in when it comes to saying the first words, starting to combine words into sentences, and use complex sentences to communicate meaning. Children begin to develop language and literacy at birth, with nonverbal cues such as eye gaze and gestures and they arrive at preschool ready to communicate with simple words, signs, and a lot of nonverbal clues. In this resource we will explore the first two strands of language and literacy- listening and speaking.