
Developing Professional Expertise in Early Literacy Instruction
Manitoba Early Literacy Intervention Teachers

Navigating choppy waters together:
Responding to the current media storm
Guiding Literacy Principles
(Reading Recovery – Marie Clay’s Theory of Literacy Processing)
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All students can learn.
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Children come to literacy with varying knowledge.
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Children construct their own understandings.
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Learners extend their own learning.
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Children take different paths to literacy learning.
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Reading and writing are complex problem solving processes.
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Reading and writing are reciprocal and interrelated processes.
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Learning to read and write involves a continuous process of change over time.
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Literacy learning involves the reading and writing of continuous texts (whole –part – whole).
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Optimal learning comes from building on children’s strengths that make it easy for children to learn.
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Optimal learning comes from learning about the unknown from the very well known.
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Optimal learning comes from a gradual release of responsibility to the learner.
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Observation and gathering evidence of how children are working on print provide the basis for effective instruction.
(Allington, 1998; Clay, 2001; Clay, 2005a, 2005b; Jones &Smith-Burke, 1999; Routman, 2005; Watson & Askew, 2009; Wood, 1998; http://readingrecovery.org/reading-recovery/teaching-children/early-literacy-learning)
