Information on each individual child's knowledge and understandings is central to the teaching strategies used in Dr. Christensen's Early Years Literacy Program.

Information of children's knowledge and skills is provided through a series of screening measures. Thus, teaching strategies are closely tied to screening and assessment. The role of assessment is seen as primarily providing information on individual student performance so that teachers can tailor the teaching program to address each individual child's developmental needs.

A variety of teaching approaches will be used in the program including collaborative learning and peer tutoring, as well as, direct teaching of skills based on the explicit teaching approach outlined by Rosenshine. This model consists of:

1. Review of previous lessons and activation of existing knowledge
2. Presentation of new content
3. Guided practice
4. Independent practice
5. Systematic monitoring of student performance
6. Provision of correctives and feedback when errors are detected

Where collaborative learning approaches are used, it is essential that teachers train children in working co-operatively together. First, teachers should develop a list of behaviours that characterise collaboration: For example:

• Listen to others
• Speak kindly to others and be courteous
• Share materials
• Include everyone's ideas
• Give everyone a turn

Initially teachers should go over the 'rules for working together'. It may be an idea to create poster cards where the collaborative behaviours are illustrated. Children should be shown the cards and concrete examples of each behaviour should be discussed. This can be followed by an activity where children practise the behaviours.

For example for 'give everyone a turn', you could say something like:

What do you say if everyone has told the group their ideas but one quiet child hasn't said anything?

You could say something like - Marcie, is there anything you'd like to say? Just to make sure that Marcie feels that people want to hear her ideas.

Whenever a collaborative activity is used, teachers should review the 'rules of collaboration' with students. It might be an idea to organise children into pairs for initial collaborative activities, later they can be organised into groups of 3 or 4.

Materials and resources will include commercially available material as well as materials developed by teachers.