Early literacy skills begin developing from birth as children interact with their environment. These emergent literacy skills include oral language development and understanding concepts about print like directionality and environmental print. Classroom activities that foster emergent literacy skills involve displaying students' names, using labels, engaging in read alouds and interactive writing. Emergent literacy lays the foundation for children to become beginning readers and progresses through fluent stages of literacy development.

1. Module 1
Early Literacy

2. A. Emergent Literacy Theory
I. Definition
- children begin developing literacy skills long before they
enter school
- includes oral language skills and ability to distinguish
signs, logos, billboards, food product labels, etc. based on
their interaction and experiences with the world
- from these early experiences, they construct “theories” of
how reading and writing works

3. Concepts About Print
II. Concepts About Print (CAP)
• Understandings about how print works;
• Printed words carry a message (termed as print
awareness), or that messages could be written
• Concept of directionality: Words are read from left to
right, top to bottom
• Environmental Print: children begin “reading” by
recognizing billboards, signs, logos, food labels, fastfood
restaurants’ names, etc.
• Concepts about Words and Concepts about the Alphabet

4. Fostering CAP
III. Classroom Activities that Foster CAP
• Students’ names are displayed
• Labels of common objects found in the classroom
• Pointing to words on the classroom calendar
• Reading aloud books, letters, newspaper, etc.
• Pointing out words on charts
• Interactive writing

5. Fostering Emergent Literacy
IV. Classroom activities that develop Emergent Reading and
Writing Skills
• Stock centers with tools of writing and reading
• Having a reading center where students could “read”
books by looking at pictures and words
• Having a dramatic play center that stimulates reading and
writing (e.g. being in a restaurant where students pretend
to read the menu, and other students pretend to take
orders from the guests
• Read alouds

6. Stages of Literacy
Development
A. Emergent
B. Beginning
C. Fluent

7. B. Schema Theory
I. Definition of Schema Theory
• Reader’s prior knowledge, including experiences and attitudes,
determines the way in which new information is understood
(McCormack & Pasquarelli, 2010)
• A person’s schema is an organized knowledge of the world
such that in order to understand something, a person has to
activate or construct a schema in order to have a framework to
understand that concept (Anderson, 1985)
• Suggests that information is organized in the brain within a
system of schemata (plural for schema) functioning like a
filing cabinet
• Schemata are linked with each other, and the ways they are
linked vary from one individual to another