The early years of life are an exciting time for emerging literacy! Our goal at Bambini Creativi is to introduce the quality of literacy in meaningful and relevant ways to empower our students to be active and confident participants in all of their reading and writing endeavors. Literacy in our program is not dissected into parts and scheduled for a particular portion of our school day, nor is it introduced by its rules in perplex ways. Instead, Bambini Creativi adopts a more holistic approach to language and literacy, and capitalizes on the many moments reading and writing opportunities emerge in the daily life of the classroom.
   Our educational program encourages students to explore the original ways to connect meaning to written code. Children may be inspired to write stories, journal experiences, create signs, document events, snail mail a friend, write a recipe, or craft a poem. Our language rich environment nurtures students to connect written code to meaning.
   Developmentally appropriate instruction is integrated throughout the day, in the skill and strategy areas of reading, writing, and spelling.   Ongoing documentation allows teachers to frequently assess children’s progress to create plans that make integrated literacy effective. Children begin to develop critical skills to interpret both the function and the purpose of fiction and informational texts. Over the course of an academic school year, students are introduced to a variety of applications for writing. Children will learn how to narrate thoughts, inform readers, create imaginative stories, and learn how to be artistic and expressive in their written communication.
   Children’s theories transform into written code, and verbal expression as they develop individual and group projects as well as evolve as a learning community. A learning group’s exciting study of insects may result in the creation of written diagrams or charts. A group of international visitors may inspire children to create signs that orient them and welcome them to our school. An upcoming graduation prompts students to create a book that captures memories of their school experience and friends.    Mysterious animal tracks in the forest provoke budding detectives to carry out research in books and on the Internet.
   Bambini Creativi appreciates language and literacy development as a social and community building endeavor that cultivates powerful and eager readers and writers. Innovations in technology allow children to interpret written work, collectively animate a classroom story or project, publish an iMovie online, or examine the written treasures we discover in the world around us.