After examining my motivation for promoting my innovation plan, I established the “why” of it all. As a preschool teacher, one of my personal goals has been to teach young children to read. The benefit of this became very real after talking to a young lady about furthering her education by going to college. After dropping out of school at 17 years old because of her poor performance, she had just gotten her GED at twenty-five. While encouraging her to apply to college first, and then getting a part-time job, I was reminded of the great need to provide students with the opportunity to develop learning skills that will contribute to success in their future education. In an article by Simon Sinek, he states that your why can be applicable in every area of life, not only where you work. Sinek’s concept that people will buy why you do what you do, not what you do, helped me to develop my why. My why is founded upon the fact that literacy is directly related to academic achievement. Due to this, we believe that children in preschool need to have early literacy skills to ensure success in their education.
By targeting key areas of literacy from oral language to alphabetic code to print knowledge, children will gain an increase in all domains of development: physical, socio-emotional, cognitive, language, and literacy. If a child’s experience with language and literacy is limited by the time they start kindergarten, they are more likely to experience academic difficulty. Providing learners the opportunity to develop these skills during preschool years will strategically decrease deficiencies that are common in formal education. Curriculum content and teacher preparation, along with parental involvement, will help cultivate these skills.
After teaching preschool for more than 15 years, I have seen early childhood education become essential in providing children from various cultures and socio-economic backgrounds, with these necessary skills. Children who enter kindergarten prepared are less likely to experience grade retention and will more than likely graduate from high school. The program will be interventional in meeting the need in early literacy.
Empowering Others With Knowledge 