Language Experience Approach

The language experience approach supports children's concept development and vocabulary growth while offering many opportunities for meaningful reading and writing activities. Another benefit of the language experience approach is the development of shared experiences that extend children's knowledge of the world around them while building a sense of classroom community. Students are involved in planning, experiencing, responding to, and recording the experience and later, in participating in "remember when we ?" conversations. Objectives The activities described on the following pages are intended particularly to support development of the following English language arts objectives. Students will demonstrate emerging:

awareness that print conveys meaning awareness that everyone's thoughts and ideas can be expressed in spoken and written language ability to gather meaning from reading or listening to others read resources that relate to personal experiences ability to make meaning known by speaking in informal situations ability to use listening to understand the meaning and intent of others ability to report factual information using various formats including pictures, charts, and written reports ability to tell and retell personal experiences ability to dictate stories, sentences, and phrases for others to transcribe.

Materials Materials used will depend to some extent upon the nature of the chosen experience. Those materials common across most experiences include:

books, poems, songs, and/or chants related to the focus chart paper and felt markers materials for writing and bookmaking cameras and film for taking pictures of the experience for use in developing memory books and memory walls.

Procedures The general procedure for the language experience approach involves the whole class or a small group in:

experiencing discussing the experience recording the experience using the record of the experience for reading and writing activities.

1. Choose a focus. A wide range of possibilities exists for the creation of language experience records. These include: o cooking (recording the recipe), special feasts, and other food experiences (describing the feast) o growing vegetables or flowers in the classroom (making a "How To Grow Vegetables/Flowers" chart) o planning a field trip, talking and writing about it both before and afterward (making lists of things to bring, rules to follow; drawing and labeling a map of where you went; describing the experience) o making various kinds of "how to" charts describing experiments the class has done or things they have made o making a record of a cultural event such as a Pow-Wow or of the visit of a special guest o summarizing a favourite story that children have heard, viewed, or dramatized several times. 2. Demonstrate print concepts as you record the experience. Initially in language experience, it is the teacher or another adult who does the recording. This is because the approach is intended to demonstrate to children the match between what they say and its written form, and to develop other print concepts. The teacher would draw attention to these aspects of print while writing on chart paper positioned so as to be visible to all the children. 3. Record children's own language. The most important aspect of recording is to use children's own words, keeping the match between what they say and what you write. Use children's names as much as possible because their own name is one of the first words children learn to recognize. As well, this practice helps to maintain children's connections to the experience in subsequent reading. 4. Vary the type of record that you create. The written product of your experience might be made into a Big Book, a bulletin board, or an illustrated chart. Other ideas for creating a lasting record of the experience include the following: o Create a class album through using your classroom camera to capture an experience. Children can dictate captions for each photograph and you can discuss concepts of print as you record what they dictate. o Have children work in pairs to draw a picture of their favorite part of the experience and then dictate the accompanying text for the teacher to write on a sentence strip. These pictures and sentence strips can then be used in a sequencing activity ("What did we do first? next? etc.") and made into a bulletin board or Big Book to be used for Shared Reading. Remember, you cannot record a statement from every child, every time you create a language experience record. Stop the discussion and recording before

the children lose interest. Pay attention to who has not had an opportunity and include them when you complete this record later in the day, the following day, or the next time you use this approach. 5. Use your records of the experience for further literacy opportunities. A main purpose of the language experience approach is to provide meaningful texts for students to read either with the support of others or alone. To facilitate this, the record of the experience should be mounted in a prominent place for several weeks following its creation and referred to regularly. Some of the ways the chart, Big Book, etc. can be used include: 15 o Shared Reading - for a "Framing" activity that will help children develop the concepts of "word" and "sentence" as well as left to right progression. o Independent and "Take Home" Reading - making a copy of the record to be photocopied for each child to illustrate, use for independent and buddy reading, and to take home to read to their families. o Sentence-matching - making large sentence strips that replicate sentences in the record for a sentence matching activity. Students can attempt to read the sentences during Shared Reading. Invite volunteers to find and place each sentence strip over the one that matches it in the experience chart or record. You can follow up a group experience of sentence matching by including the chart and the sentence strips as a choice during Center Time. o Sequencing Words into Sentences - following sentence matching activities, sentence strips from the class chart or record can also be cut up into words. Demonstrate this but allow the children to do the cutting. They can work individually or in pairs to reconstruct the sentences. o Child-led Rereading Activities - inviting children to become the teacher and lead other children through parts of the chart, Big Book, etc. by pointing out words they know, or reading aloud specific sections and framing them by sweeping their hand or a pointer along as they read. As you develop many charts and books using the language experience approach, children can choose which chart or book they would like to lead the other students in rereading. English Language Arts: A Curriculum Guide for the Elementary Level (1992) also contains instructional strategies related to the Language Experience Approach. See:

Daily Records, p. 99 Making Books and Charts, p. 112 Using Experience Charts, p. 138.