1. Creating a Literate Environment
Shona Hendrickson
Walden University
EDUC 6706: The Beginning Reader, PreK-3
Instructor: Dr. Martha Moore

2. What is a Literate
Environment?
● A place where one develops skills to communicate
authentically through speaking, listening, reading,
and writing (Cooper, 2000).
● A place rich in language and print (Cooper, 2000).
● A place accessible to all students regardless of their
learning abilities, home language, or learning styles
(Ruckdeschel, 2011).

3. Three Essential Parts of a Literate Environment
1. Getting to Know Literacy Learners
2. Selecting Texts
3. Literacy Instruction
-Interactive Perspective
-Critical Perspective
-Response Perspective

4. Getting to Know
Literacy Learners
Literacy remains paramount in learning, not only for
language development, but also as the foundation of all academic
disciplines including science and mathematics (Huffaker, 2005).
Literacy is a process that begins in infancy and continues into
adulthood, if not throughout life (Tompkins, 2010).
In order to create a literate environment, as teachers we
need to first get to know out students. We need to get to know
their cognitive and non-cognitive abilities (Laureate Education
Inc., 2010b). This information about our students is important as it
will contribute to their success in reading (Afflerbach, 2007).

5. To provide an effective classroom environment that caters to the
cognitive needs of students, it is important that assessment be done to see
what reading levels they are at. Assessment should be done to test their
vocabulary skills, reading fluency, comprehension skills, decoding skills, etc.
Examples of Cognitive Assessments
Running Records
Comprehension Questions Activity
‘Words I Know’ Test

6. Teachers must get to know their students better in order to have
their best interests at heart (Laureate Education Inc., 2010d). Teachers
need to find out about students’ interests, family background, experiences
and what motivates them. The better you know your students, the better
you can connect them with texts that impact them in profound ways
(Laureate Education, Inc., 2010b).
Examples of Non-Cognitive Assessments
 Journals
 Composition Exercises

7. Selecting Texts
Texts are presented in many different forms today (Laureate
Education Inc., 2010). All of which has a place in the literacy classroom
whether it is in the form of printed books or digital media. However,
when selecting texts for students, it is important to think about text
difficulty, readability, length, structure, size of print and visual support
(Laureate Inc., 2010). This is very useful in creating a literate
environment
I now realized from Dr. Almasi that texts selected should fall on
the continuum of linguistic to semiotic and narrative to informational
(Laureate Education Inc., 2010). Selecting texts through this Literacy
Matrix, will allow me as a teacher to consider a variety of literacy
experiences that would be best suitable to students’ needs and
interests.

8. Literacy Matrix:
The literacy matrix is a 2 digital construct for analyzing and selecting
texts (Laureate Education, Inc., 2010). Texts selected should fall on the
continuum of linguistic to semiotic and narrative to informational.
A text with no illustrations at all tells a story that is linguistic and
narrative (Laureate Education, Inc., 2010).
A text that is made up of only pictures is semiotic and narrative
(Laureate Education, Inc., 2010).
Even though both of these are narrative texts, the way the narrative is
communicated differs.

9. Linguistic Hard
Narrative Text Information Text
Semiotic
Easy
(Laureate Education Inc., 2010f)

10. Things to think about
when selecting text
 Length of text
 Size of print
 Number of sentences
 Text structure

11. Perspectives in
Literacy Learning

12. Literacy Lesson:
Interactive Perspective
Interactive perspective is a strategy/style of teaching
geared towards getting students to construct their own meaning
from any experience. It does not mean leaving students to make
whatever sense they can from any experience, but, needs the
interaction of teachers to interact and challenge student
thinking exposing them to new ideas (Hammonds, 2011). In
reading the interactive perspective focuses on students being
strategic and metacognitive readers and writers; meaning
students can read and write accurately, fluently, and with
comprehension.

13. Through this practice, I learned that the goal of
the interactive perspective is to help students become
strategic readers and writers (Laureate Education Inc.,
2010i). This can be done through the use of strategies
such as read aloud, shared reading, word walls, word
sorts and K-W-L charts.

14. The lesson I created for the interactive perspective focused on
comprehension of informational text. In this lesson, students read a
book about Gardens. The K-W-L chart was used to get students to
interact with the text. Students had to identify what they knew about
gardens, what they wanted to know and at the end what they learned
from the text about gardens. This lesson was effective as it got
students to open up and share their experiences. Students were also
able to make connections with the text because it was within their
experience which is an important aspect of the interactive
perspective.

15. Literacy Lesson:
Critical and Response Perspectives
The critical and response perspectives are two important
components of literacy instructions that should be used by
teachers.
The critical perspective teaches students how to
critically examine text; while teaching students to think about
who wrote the text and how the author feels about the topic
they are writing about (Laureate Education Inc., 2011).

16. The response perspective on the other
hand gives students the opportunity to
experience and respond to text (Laureate
Education, Inc., 2011).
However across each perspective, the
teacher must be cognizant of planning for the
learners, the texts, and the instructional
practices (Hoffman, 2011).

17. Teaching a lesson using the critical and response perspective has
given me ideas of how I could create a literate environment. In order to get
students to develop the skills of thinking critically and responding to text,
text would be selected on topics such as ethnicity, race, gender, or social
status. This would give students the opportunity to put themselves in the
shoes of the author based on text content.
When students examine texts critically, they would begin to think
more deeply about them; and that is vitally important (Laureate Education,
Inc., 2010a). According to Dr. Almasi, looking at text and examining it from
different perspectives can allow students to look at the believability of
what they read (Laureate Education, Inc., 2010c).

18. Activities to reinforce
the critical and response
perspectives:
- Open-mind portraits
- Question-Answer-Relationships (QAR)
- Questioning the Author
- Response Journals

19. References
* Afflerbach, P. (2007). Understanding and using reading assessment, K–12. Newark, DE: International Reading
Association.
* Cooper, J. D. (2000). Literacy: Helping children construct literacy. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company.
* Framework for literacy development [Lecture notes]. (2011). Retrieved from http://sylvan.live.ecollege.com
* Hammonds, B. (2010). Interactive teaching approach. Retrieved from http://www.leading-learning.co.nz/quality-
learning/interactive-teaching.html
* Hoffman, B. (2011). Framework for literacy instruction: 3 Perspectives. Retrieved from
http://mylearningspringboard.com/framework- for-literacy-instruction-3-perspectives/
* Huffaker, D. (2005). The Educated Blogger: Using Weblogs to Promote Literacy in the Classroom. AACE Journal, 13(2),
91-98. Norfolk, VA: AACE. Retrieved from http://www.editlib.org/p/5680
* Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2011). Perspectives on Literacy Learning [Webcast]. The Beginning
Reader, PreK-3. Baltimore, MD: Author.
* Laureate Education, Inc. (2010). Analyzing and selecting text. [Webcast]. The Beginning Reader, PreK-3. Baltimore, MD:
Author.
* Laureate Education, Inc. (Producer). (2010a). Analysing and Selecting Text [Webcast]. The beginning reader, Prek-3.
Baltimore, MD: Author.
* Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2010b). Changes in Literacy Education. [Webcast]. The beginning
reader, PreK-3. Baltimore, MD: Author.
* Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2010c). Critical Perspective. [Webcast]. The beginning reader, PreK-3.
Baltimore, MD: Author.
* Laureate Education Inc. (2010d). Getting to know your students. [Webcast]. The beginning reader, PreK-3 . Baltimore,
MD: Author.
* Laureate Education Inc. (2010f). (Executive Producer) Analyzing and Selecting Text. [webcast]. The beginning reader,
PreK-3. Baltimore: author
* Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2010i). Strategic Processing. [Webcast]. The beginning reader, PreK-3.
Baltimore, MD: Author.
* Laureate Education, Inc. (2010). Assessing word knowledge. [Webcast]. The Beginning Reader, PreK-3. Baltimore, MD:
Author.
* Laureate Education, Inc. (2010). Getting to know your students. [Webcast]. The Beginning Reader, PreK-3. Baltimore,
MD: Author.
* Ruckdeschel, S. (2011). How to create a literate classroom. eHow Web. Retrieved May 8, 2011, from http://www.ehow.com
* Tompkins, G. E. (2010). Literacy for the 21st century: A balanced approach (5th ed.). Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.