This fact, this confident declaration, accompanies a 3- turning 4-year old’s swoop-spiral-swirl line in Innovations in Early Childhood: The International Reggio Exchange, vol. 18, no. 2, Spring 2011. Yes, we clearly see snail, it coils itself out along the top of the column of type and our early childhood education hearts sing out with the joy of all that is s-n-a-i-l—spiral shell, tentacles reaching out, searching the landscape and smelling the air. Snail.
My copy of this issue is dog-eared and well-loved. I carry it to school and I bring it back home again each day. I look at, reading different sections again, and think about the environment we have created and work hard to maintain. I think about the spectacular flow of the spiral line that connects symbol to the written word.
I return each time to think about something that we do that is so vital to our school and its children and that is our symbols that we have created for each class (the Bugs, the Leaves, and the Tracks). Each child chooses a symbol that will mark his or her journal, cubby hook, artwork, and daily check-in. The class names indicate the collection of graphic/pictograph symbols the children are able to choose from—insects, leaves, and animal and insect tracks.
On the surface, these selections may appear to be part of a classroom management system and of course they are an integral part of building classroom community, but their roots spiral outward from a literacy development core. We know that children recognize and identify with symbols before they can identify the string of connected letters that equal their written/spoken names.
In the Bugs (2s/3s) class, Andrea uses photographs of each child along with the symbol to build sight recognition. I have selected to use the leaves of trees for the 3s/4s and animal and insect tracks for the incredibly sophisticated 4s/5s. We can easily find these leaves in our neighborhoods and although it will be a rare and happy day indeed that we would see a bobcat track, we can find every other track walking along the banks of Sligo or Long Branch Creeks. Families may have to wander out a little farther to find black bear. Bobcats and black bears do, of course, live in the Eastern United States, but they do not often wander around town here, both make the news when they do. All this helps galvanize the children’s belief in the importance of these symbols and begins a conversation of connection…to each other and to the world around them.
This practice adds context to the conversation of symbol on paper equals meaning on a very personal level. It trains the eye to seek out the thread that of letters, images, and symbolic language. The practice of lining the environment with symbolic language that is meaningful to the children and connects them directly to their work and their actions builds literacy skills echoes and reverberates. The children naturally seek out more information about the written word. Using these symbols informs other people (adult and child) to view the same with all the gravitas and importance that attaching their symbol to it would imply. “This is mine,” “I did this,” “This is important,” “I have written snail.”
