Developmentally Appropriate Practice

Living with Letters was created to invite families and caregivers to explore experiences that foster emergent literacy behaviors such as early writing experiences, discovering print in our environment, recognizing letters of the alphabet, singing nursery rhymes, and reading stories aloud. Although each area of literacy will be presented separately on this website, prekindergarten children actually learn these skills concurrently as they are developmentally ready to do so.

Developmentally Appropriate – Developmentally Appropriate Practice as presented by the National Association for the Education of Young Children supports the premise that development and learning are interrelated. Well-researched teaching practices must encourage children’s intellectual development while also enhancing their social, emotional, and physical development. This occurs when children engage in real life tasks, hands-on projects, and playful activities that interest them (Copple & Bredekamp, 2009). The goal of this website is to suggest appropriate activities that accomplish this task. Ideally, these activities will become part of the daily routine that may be enjoyed at any time during the day whenever parents and caregivers are together with their prekindergarten children.

Theme Based Learning

“A 21st Century goal is to use themes that strengthen and build children’s word and world knowledge. For this we need compelling themes that organize experiences, activities, projects and play…” (Roskos, Tabors & Lenhart, 2009). Every video and podcast shown on this website are examples of themes or topics that we discover in nature or in our surroundings. Parents, caregivers, and their prekindergarten children begin the learning process by using their five senses to experience the discovery, read books about the topic together, create a hands-on-project, write about the discovery and continually share the experience with their young learner through dialogue.