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Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
  1. How do children make meaning of the world?
     1. Check your understanding
     2. Extend your understanding
     3. Apply your understanding
  2. What does knowledge representation mean?
     1. Check your understanding
     2. Extend your understanding
     3. Apply your understanding
  3. What is the role of language as one of the symbolic tools through which humans make meaning and construct cultures?
     1. Check your understanding
     2. Extend your understanding
     3. Apply your understanding
  4. What is the role of children’s art and art making as significant ways of knowing, problem solving and creating that allow for the construction of multiple meanings?
     1. Check your understanding
     2. Extend your understanding
     3. Apply your understanding
  Resources
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10

3. Apply your understanding

1.    Kindergarten student Ali has been a concern to his teacher. He and his family emigrated from Somalia four years previously. This is his second time in kindergarten and three quarters of the way into the school year he does not yet recognize any letters, including those in his name. He is tapping gently on a xylophone during Explore Time. His teacher observes as he goes back and forth between playing the xylophone and writing letters on a sheet of paper. He then tells her he would like to play a song for her and proceeds to refer to the notes he has written down as he plays the instrument.

Incorporating multiliteracies into the classroom is a means of ensuring that children from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds have expanded opportunities to represent what they know. In this case, the teacher’s focus on literacy as reading and writing limited her understanding of Ali’s ways of making meaning and representing his thinking. Think about some very broad topics you have taught or seen being taught. What might be some ways of incorporating multiple modes or literacies into explorations of such topics?

2.    Refer back to the construction project scenario (Scenario A). What are some of the ways children might use different modes to represent their understanding?

3.    Reflect on the four principles of new literacies:  internet and communication technologies (ICTs) necessitate using new and different strategies and practices; these new literacies enable full economic, civic, and personal participation in our global community; ICTs change as technologies change or new ones develop; and as multiliteracies, these literacies are multiple, complex, and take multiple forms and can be represented in many ways. Think about the various forms of technology (ICT) you use in your own learning or have used with young children. Discuss how several of these can be used in ways that advance these principles. Then, research and try out some ICTs aimed at young children. Review the utility of these based on the four principles.

4.    Thinking about the socio-cultural political context in which you live and will eventually teach and reflect on why it is critical to introduce and incorporate new literacies in early childhood classrooms.