In keeping with the recommendations of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, our approach to literacy is one which integrates reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Children are provided with many opportunities to engage in meaningful and enjoyable activities involving language. We view reading as thinking and understanding, and consider learning to read as a constructive, problem-solving process rather than mastery of a hierarchy of isolated skills. We guide children as they develop their own thinking strategies to recognize, understand, and remember printed information. We believe that basic skills develop when children see them as meaningful and useful.

Some of the activities used to foster the development of language and literacy include:

• listen to stories and poems
  
• attach meaning to print
  
• talk informally and play with other children and adults
  
• observe and analyze social situations
  
• retell and dramatize stories
  
• extend and/or create alternative endings for stories
  
• tell and dictate original stories
  
• seek out book experiences for pleasure and information
  
• utilize technology
  
• interpret classroom charts and graphs
  
• experiment with writing by drawing, copying, and inventing their own spelling
  
• make books
  
• ask questions
  
• sequence, sort, and classify
  
• learn stories, poems, and songs
  
• recognize letters and sound patterns