Orange Early Childhood Center
397 Park Avenue, Orange, NJ 07050
- Orange Early Childhood Center
- Overview
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Orange Board Of Education
Office of Early Childhood
The Early Childhood Program uses the High/Scope Growing Readers Early Literacy Curriculum for its focused approach to literacy instruction. This curriculum has four key principles for early literacy instruction:
- Comprehension
- Phonological Awareness
- Alphabetic Principle
- Concepts about Print
This focused approach to literacy development in young children focuses on these four aspects of early literacy because of the strong evidence that young children’s knowledge of these concepts is a solid predictor of their reading achievement in later years.
The Four Areas of Concentration
Comprehension – vocabulary building, prediction, connection, and retelling
Phonological Awareness – rhyming, alliteration (beginning phoneme substitution), and segmentation
Alphabetic Principle – name recognition, name writing, letter recognition, and letter-sound correspondence
Concepts about Print – identifying book parts, orienting books for reading, distinguishing between pictures and words, and understanding the direction of text
Growing Readers is designed to be used in early childhood programs and it is structured around three basic elements:
- Small group literacy activities at 3 developmental levels
- New and classic children’s books
- Common classroom materials
Together, these three components provide the tools for systematically and specifically supporting the growth of language and literacy in preschool and kindergarten classrooms.