Simi Valley Childcare: Emergent Literacy Skills in Preschool

Abstract: Simi Valley child care facilities need to update their curriculum to facilitate learning in elementary school.

 Simi Valley Childcare: Last year, only one third of the nation’s fourth graders read at a proficient level or better and the same number read at a basic level. This means that one third of all fourth grade students in the United States cannot read and this number has not changed much since 1992, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Federal programs base the funding they dole out to school districts on the performance of the students in that district. This forces schools to dig deeper to find ways to improve these dismal statistics. Since 1997, states have set standards of learning in every subject for every grade level down through kindergarten. Now schools are looking to Simi Valley child care to help increase student performance and, because preschools have traditionally been a place for young children to play and socialize, much research is being done to determine what, and how much, preschoolers should be expected to learn.

In the course of a study into the beliefs of preschool teachers regarding print literacy instruction, some challenges facing school districts were found in their efforts to raise scores. First, preschool teachers do not have a consistent understanding of how and when children learn to read and write and some have no understanding. Second, preschool teachers are not uniformly knowledgeable about literacy; this includes information from how a student should hold a pencil to the cognitive development in a child’s brain. And, third, there is a huge variation in classroom practices and none of the participants in the study knew if their form of instruction was the best way to foster print literacy. Understanding and changing the beliefs of preschool teachers is important because of their relation to practice. Teachers must know what they are doing and why they are doing it in order for learning to take place. To be continued…