Today's News

Building Concepts of Print

Stage of Literacy Development:

Stage 0: Foundation for Literacy
Stage 1: Beginning Literacy

Ages:

4-6

Grade Range:

PreK K 1st

Food Groups:

Primary:
Concepts of Print, Motivation for Literacy

Transcript

Teacher: Todays News is our morning message and it helps us read the words and it also helps us share the marker and practice our writing. I would like everyone to put on their reading glasses because we need lots of help today. Are we ready? Are we going to start to read over here?

Teacher and Students: No

Teacher: Here?

Teacher and Students: No

Teacher: Where?

Student: Here!

Teacher: Thank you. Are we ready?

Choral: Wednesday, February third, Todays news. It is now the month called February. We will be learn about friendship. Did that sound right to you?

Students: No.

Student: ing

Teacher: What?

Student: Put a ing.

Teacher: Lets try it that way. 

Teacher and Students: We will be learning about friendship.

Teacher: Does that sound better?

Students: Yes.

Teacher: How do we spell ing?

Teacher and Students: I-N-G

Teacher and Students: What does a good friend do? 

Teacher: Whats this called? 

Students: Question mark.

Teacher: Question mark. When do we use a question mark?

Student: When you ask a question.

Teacher: Thats right. [Students Name], could you print your name here for [Students Name]s News. And then Im wondering, [Students Name], if you could think about answering that question. What does a good friend do? All of you can be thinking about that.

Student: A good friend can help other friends.

Teacher: Thats wonderful.

Related References

Reading Rockets  Print Awareness: Guidelines for Instruction
http://www.readingrockets.org/article/print-awareness-guidelines-instruction

Activity Objective

The goal of Today's News: Building Concepts of Print is to demonstrate the features of written language using a morning message printed on chart paper. The teacher reads the message aloud, drawing the students attention to various concepts of print. The teacher uses a pointer to point to each word as she reads, demonstrating that the text represents words and goes from left to right and top to bottom of the page.  On different days the teacher highlights various text features that they are currently learning in class, including word endings, spellings of common high frequency words, and that the message makes sense.  A different student-of-the-day may act as the teachers helper, sharing the pointer, reading the message and assisting by making corrections and additions. The whole process is an interactive one with the class to motivate them to participate in reading, predicting and fixing errors in the text.

Quick Tips

Additional Comments:

-The morning message or community news activity can be very effective on an interactive whiteboard. Students can take turns going up to the board to circle words, fix errors, and point to words as they are read. A time-saving advantage of doing this activity using an interactive whiteboard is that the messages can be refined and reused year after year.