“I feel that then they’re more keen to do anything to do with words and stories. Janice believes the first three rungs of the literacy ladder build up the knowledge needed to engage with the last two, reading and writing. I want to emphasise that for teachers it’s a wonderful thing to get your children to talk.” That’s what communication is all about, being able to express yourself and being able to put your experience into some kind of story. “The most important thing of all is for the children in your own classroom to be encouraged to make up their own stories. “Learning to put their experiences into a form so that other people will enjoy listening to them, learning what a story is and enjoying stories. Once students understand the importance of individual words, they are able to learn to combine these into a narrative or story. “It’s just a very silly thing to do but it means they’re learning the importance of words, it’s all about naming things.” In the younger classes she works with, Janice gets to know her students by asking them to make up a name for themselves. “It’s important that children learn, not by exercises and things like that, but they just see the importance of words, literally collecting words, building words and enjoying the sound and the rhythm of words.” The first thing on my literacy ladder is the importance of listening, and then from that comes language,” she says. “I think it’s really, really important that children learn to listen because nearly all information comes from listening and certainly nearly all relationships develop from listening. In a lecture delivered as part of the Storylines Margaret Mahy Awards ceremony, Janice discussed the idea of a literacy ladder, which breaks down the steps needed for children to develop a love of language into listening, language, story, reading and writing. “If all that is in place then they’ve got a much better chance of being happy in life.” “If they can speak well, put their thoughts into order, and if they can read and write well they feel good about themselves,” she says. New Zealand author and 2018 Storylines Margaret Mahy Medal winner Janice Marriott with students from her online writing courses.
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