Digging for literacy? Donuts may be more helpful than you think.

Over the weekend I went on a “literacy dig” with some fellow pre-service teachers to find literacy in the community that our children are undoubtedly absorbing on a daily basis. It was interesting walking around a large shopping center to think about all of the sights, sounds, colors and ideas that children are taking in. They are continually exposed to literacy outside of school, and need it to communicate in the world, so why not use everyday experiences to teach your students about literacy?

On our literacy dig we were focused on the signs, surroundings, people, language, and printed text within the store. I was focused on the physical environment, noticing the bright white atmosphere, the rows of rectangular fluorescent lights dispensed across the ceiling, and the shiny black balls containing security cameras stuck in the ceiling everywhere. I thought about how a child might view this all too common space—everything organized, with red embellishments everywhere you look, pictures of happy people hang from the ceilings, red signs with white lettering are spaced out along the ceiling. What does all this tell a child? How do they receive this visual information? How does it make them feel?

There are red kiosks with red telephones, red shopping carts, red shopping baskets, and employees walking around all in red t-shirts. Naturally, red is known to make one anxious, and fluorescent lights never help such a matter. What is a child to make of this completely sense-overloaded environment? Will they point out the numbers and letters they know? Will those numbers and letters recall numbers or letters they have seen in other places? Will they try talking to anyone in the store? Is it a shopping experience they will reenact with other children? Will they talk about it after it is over?

In an article by Rebecca Powell and Nancy Davidson entitled “The Donut House: Real World Literacy in an Urban Kindergarten Classroom,” a kindergarten classroom practices literacy through all the efforts involved with creating a donut shop in their classroom. The article reinforced the idea that students have to want to understand. We can do this by posing the projects as real world literacy events—like taking your students on a field trip to a donut shop so that they can see for themselves how it is done, and then allowing them to create their own donut shop, by going through all the requirements you would in real life. Through taking notes on their field trip, making lists for supplies, brainstorming names for their shop, writing and reading letters and applications, and creating a big book documenting their experience to read and re-read later, they put their literacy skills to use. Every new step leading up to their “Grand Opening” was a new practice opportunity.

These are the skills that students will take away from school and apply to their lives. Powell and Davidson (2005) said that it is especially important for students living in high-crime and high-poverty areas to believe that they have the ability to transform their life circumstances. Perhaps you could agree that what goes on in the real world is often times far more interesting than learning spelling and practicing your grammar. This is precisely why it is important for students to get their literacy practice through means of more meaningful inquiry projects. In the example of The Donut House, the students engaged in reading and writing through a number of ways you would in your adult life. As Powell and Davidson (2005) put it, “Their literacy can be used for transformative ends.” Bringing real-world literacy into the classroom shows students how reading and writing skills they learn in school will be essential in their everyday lives, and how it can change their lives.