Sometimes, the teacher may write down what the child dictates; or the child may choose to do the writing him or herself. These journals provide a record of specific things that captured the children’s interest, as well as documentation of students’ drawing and writing capacity over the course of the year.


Phonological Awareness


Activities that foster phonological awareness can be woven into the outdoor classroom experience. New vocabulary is introduced contextually, as teachers and students seek language that reflects the phenomena they encounter. Songs, rhymes, and games can be adapted to involve oral language, movement, and interaction with the environment itself. This is especially valuable during the winter months when it may be important to keep warm by being physically active.


Laying the Foundation for Literacy


Early literacy involves a suite of interrelated capacities, including oral language comprehension, print knowledge and print motivation, and phonological awareness. According to NAEYC (2003),


Children’s early reading and writing learning ... is embedded in a larger developing system of oral communication. Early literacy is an emerging set of relationships between reading and writing. These relationships are situated in a broader communication network of speaking and listening, whose components work together to help the learner negotiate the world and make sense of experience. (Kathleen A. Roskos,


James F. Christie, and Donald Richgels, p. 2)


It can be easy as a teacher to feel a pressure to “produce,” to send children home with an elaborate craft or scrawled- upon paper that shows “what we did” that day at school. Of course, such activities, skillfully designed, have their place in a well-rounded preschool curriculum. I remind myself each day, however, that it is the quality of my presence—my attention and engagement in interaction— that matters most. That quality of


presence supports the type of dialogue and play that fosters language development. It is also the creative fuel necessary


CLEARING Fall 2017 www.clearingmagazine.org


for weaving sound, reading, and writing into experience in meaningful ways. An outdoor classroom can provide a high degree of connectivity between all of these modes of learning, laying the foundation for literacy by treating it as an integrated, relevant, joyful part of students’ development.


A Community of Practitioners In the course of writing this article, I reached out to other


programs in the newly-formed Washington Nature Preschool Association and invited educators to share their experience with the opportunities and challenges of early literacy instruction out-of-doors. While our programs vary widely, I found that we share many of the same questions regarding how to make the most of this unique type of learning environment. I’d like to thank Stephanie Day at Roots Forest School in McCall, Idaho, Sarah Salazar-Tipton at Olympic Nature Experience, and Janet Killmer at Tacoma Outdoor Ability Development School, for sharing their perspectives on early literacy in their programs. If you’d like to join our conversation on this subject, please feel free to get in touch.


❏


Joanna Wright is a lead teacher with Fiddleheads Forest School, a program of the University of Washington Botanic Gardens in Seattle, WA. Before coming to Fiddleheads, she trained as a naturalist educator at Alderleaf Wilderness College where she specialized in wildlife tracking, and holds a Level III Track and Sign Certification. She is particularly interested in the significance of direct ecological experience for health, development and learning.


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