Essay On Early Literacy

Early childhood literacy experiences can contribute heavily on a child’s early successes and difficulties once they reach formal schooling. Early literacy experiences can really put a kid in front and be more ready once they start school. Parents play an important part to this as they control a lot of a child’s early experiences with literacy. The culture of where kids grow up also can either benefit a kid’s literacy or it can put the kids behind other students. These experiences can be the differences of a kid passing his early English courses or failing them.

Early literacy experiences really can help in the process of getting kids ahead in their reading and understanding of it. These experiences can start even at six months old as kids can take literacy experiences from a language spoken to them. Kids take in a lot from early ages as their brain is always picking things up and trying to learn new things. So if a kid is exposed to literacy early on then there is a chance the kid can pick up and learn many of the essential things needed in literacy. A kid can use these early literacy learnings to his advantage as it can help him in
many ways in the future. For example, kids with more literacy experiences are going to have better vocabulary and be able to speak more fluently than kids with less literacy experiences.

Many of the things that kids do in their early life is controlled by their parents. So it really depends on the parents on how well a kid’s early literacy experiences are. A parent’s literacy levels can also effect the way a kid can learn early on. For example, if a parent doesn’t have a good grasp of literacy or their literacy isn’t that good then kids really can’t learn as much from them. The saying “kids learn from their parent’s actions”, is completely true because kids start imitating before the age of one. So a parent’s literacy level can truly affect if the kid will have early literacy experiences

The culture where children grow up is very influential in whether they will have early literacy experiences or not.
From the reading What No Bedtime Story means it really explains how culture really affects the way kids take in information. As it talks about different environments where kids took in information differently. One of the environments was a main town where parents had knowledge of literacy and are very involved in the kids learning(Heath). This lead to children’s literacy rates to being higher because the kids had a lot of background help from the parents. Another environment was Tracton which was rewarding for like imitation not actually verbalizing(Heath). This process did not have parents involvement. This lead to the kids not to get the same literacy experience and falling behind the students from the other
culture.

In my childhood, both of my parents were from different countries and both spoke a different language causing my early literacy experiences to be very challenging. Growing up I really struggled with English as both of my parents had different native languages and English as there second language. My literacy was behind many other students when I first started school because of this. I remember trying real hard to pick up the language as it was going to be my third language. After, about first grade I think I started to understand and comprehend it really well mostly because everyone in the school spoke it. After I had the basics down I felt really comfortable and finally thought I was caught up.

Early literacy experiences are really important for kids as playing catch up is very hard. These experiences can lead to major success down the road as kids will have more knowledge coming in to school. Without these experiences a kid can fall back and have an unfair disadvantage compared to students who have these experiences.