Letter of the Week

While reading the article written by the teachers who took a different spin on teaching the children in their Kindergarten classroom to read, it brought much excitement to me as a future teachers. The concept of empowering them on the first day by prompting them with environmental print, was a genius idea. Children need to feel as though they are competent and able to read before they can have to confidence to learn. It is important to give children familiar experiences to relate to the new experiences they are having. Their names are familiar words to them, and it was a brilliant idea for the teachers to use that as a springboard for their reading. The only thing about this is, some of the children, Pedro for example, was not able to identity the name of the letter when the teacher pointed to it. In the NAEYC article, it talks about how important "letter naming" is. I know that these teachers took a different approach than the norm, and it resulted in their children becoming powerful writers and beginning readers. That was in 2002 though, and now there is so much pressure on children with the standardized tests in Kindergarten. I wonder if this concept were put into action now and those children were tested, how would they perform? If this worked, and they scored better on the tests, then teachers would be more willing to implement this into their classrooms. How do you break the norm of the "Letter of the Week" concept, if all the other teachers aren't on board?