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| Building Blocks are a set of goals that when developed in
the kindergarten will:: |
- Instill a desire to learn to read and write
- Develop phonemic awareness
- Encourage letter and sound recognition
- Phonemic awareness
- Teach essential language and print concepts
- Extend vocabulary
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| It is important to note: Building
Blocks is not Four Blocks! Cheryl Sigmon describes and
contrasts the two in Ariticle
#16 on Teachers.Net.
The overall goal of Building Blocks is to provide a developmentally
appropriate kindergarten classroom which accepts all children where they
are and takes them forward on their literacy journey. The six
Building Blocks are not separate structured blocks, but are goals which
are integrated throughout the instructional day of a Kindergarten
classroom through a variety of activities. The activities and
concepts behind Building Blocks is currently best describe in
"Month-By-Month Reading and Writing for Kindergarten" by Dottie
Hall and Pat Cunningham. |
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The Six Building Blocks are: |
| 1. |
| Desire to Learn to Read & Write |
| Create an environment where all students see
themselves becoming independent readers and writers. |
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| 2. |
| Language Concepts |
| Foster the ability to read and write words
through the use of morning messages, journal entries, sentence
building activities, and environmental print. |
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| 3. |
| Print Concepts |
| Teach print concepts by modeling how to write
and participating in shared reading and shared writing
experiences. |
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| 4. |
| Phonemic Awareness |
| Develop phonemic awareness, including the
concept of rhyme, through activities with poetry, rhyming
books, tongue twisters, and playing with language. |
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| 5. |
| Interesting Words |
| Extend the list of real-life words that
students find personally relevant, such as favorite restaurant
names, favorite cartoon characters, and family members. |
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| 6. |
| Letters & Sounds |
| Encourage letter and sound recognition through
activities with alphabet books, beginning and ending sounds,
and shared writing of predictable charts. |
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| The Building Blocks and the activities that support them
are meant to simulate the at-home reading and writing experiences which
many children in today's society may not have been exposed to. The
developers state that: |
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"A developmentally appropriate
kindergarten is like a good home, where children can learn through
playing, cooking, watching, listening, acting, reading or pretend reading,
and writing or pretend writing. It is a place where they can explore
their environment, ask questions, and answer questions. It is a
place where the teacher is like a parent: reading to the children and
talking about the stories they read; writing for the children and allowing
them to write for different purposes; having time to explore the community
on field trips, and talking about those experiences together. It is
a place where children clean up after themselves, learn more about
familiar and unfamiliar topics (usually called themes), and learn more
about what interests them most--themselves. Most importantly, it is
a place where children learn that reading provides both enjoyment and
information, and they develop the desire to learn to read and write." |
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(Dottie Hall & Pat
Cunningham; Month-by-Month Reading and Writing for Kindergarten;
Carson-Dellosa Publishing Co.; page 2) |
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| For more information about Building
Blocks see: |
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| Notes from sessions at the 4 Blocks Leadership
Conference 2000
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| Notes from sessions at the Kankakee 2000
Workshops
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