Integrating Literacy Naturally: Avoiding the One-Size-Fits-All Curriculum in Early Childhood

Integrating Literacy Naturally is a guide for nurturing a love of literacy in both teachers and young children. More than a hundred children’s book titles and other resources serve as springboards for cultivating that love and meeting individual literacy needs in developmentally appropriate ways. And, educator spotlight stories show how theories move to practice. Pinkerton and Hewitt draw on their love of literacy and over four decades of combined experience to help readers navigate individualized instruction, purposeful play, literacy integration, classroom libraries, and a reimagined workshop approach. Examples for how to do all of this with children’s texts are presented throughout the book. Eight guiding principles provide an easy path to becoming an intentional, authentic teacher who focuses on the individual needs of children and avoids one-sized literacy instruction. The principles grew from heart to heart conversations the authors had about joyful reading and writing experiences being reduced to worksheets and rote memorization in many classrooms. This book moves teachers far away from drill the skill literacy. Use it as a guide on your path to making literacy learning both playful and intentional in the early childhood classroom.

About the Author :
Kim Pinkerton, EdD, is an educational consultant and literacy educator with over 20 years of experience as an elementary teacher, developmental literacy instructor, and associate professor of reading and literacy. Her primary teaching and research interests include early literacy practices, individualized literacy instruction, children’s and young adult literature, and past and present literacy lives of teachers. Amelia Hewitt, EdD, is an early childhood educator with over 25 years of experience, serving as a PK-2 classroom teacher and associate professor of early childhood teacher education. Her primary areas of interest are addressing the needs of the whole child through purposeful play and developmentally appropriate teaching.

Review :
Pinkerton and Hewitt offer a practical, research-based guide to supporting early literacy development with an emphasis on creating an early literacy learning environment full of rich experiences and effective routines. Through this superb resource, Pinkerton and Hewitt support early educators' goals of fostering literacy development in each and every child. The authors’ love of reading is evident throughout this practical guide to literacy instruction, which includes research-based pedagogical methods, clear descriptions of best practice, and multiple references to rich resources. Teachers, preservice teachers, and parents will find the text easy to read with creative ideas and examples that can be implemented immediately in the classroom or at home. Finally, a text that recognizes literacy must have as its nucleus reading and writing—both working and complementing each other for our students. That Integrating Literacy Naturally: Avoiding the One-Size-Fits-All Curriculum in Early Childhood pinpoints early childhood as the critical entry point makes this text a primer for all of us who teach English language arts—Pre-K-graduate school. Pinkerton and Hewitt have taken workshop approach in a fresh and exciting direction. With a focus towards the importance of play and student engagement, this book provides practical but thought-provoking ideas to reimagine your literacy workshop. Their introduction of an iZone will especially speak to primary educators who are looking for relevant planning to meet the needs of the youngest learners.