The Four Blocks Approach: Supporting Balanced Literacy Development

Academic Leaders used the Four Blocks Approach to ensure that students improved their literacy skills during the intensive five weeks of Camp Summer Plus (CSP). This approach was developed by literacy experts Dr. Patricia Cunningham and Dr. Dorothy Hall, along with first grade teacher Margaret DeFree in North Carolina in 1989. It has two guiding principles:

•  “All children don’t learn the same way”; and
• Children can learn literacy skills without being placed into groups according to skill level.

The Four Blocks Approach was designed to cater to students’ individual learning style in a classroom of students with varying skill levels. By employing each block during the Language Arts lesson, teachers are able to support the development of skills in reading and writing in a balanced way on a daily basis.The first session began with read aloud. The goals of the read aloud block “are to engage students in reading, to model fluent and expressive reading, and to build important literacy skills such as comprehension” (SEDL, n.d.).The read aloud activities include: 

• Previewing the book;
• Asking students to make predictions and connections to prior knowledge;
• Stopping at purposeful moments to emphasize elements of the story;
• Guiding students with questions; and
• Closing the selection with oral or written responses to what they heard.

Auntie Alicia, a Teaching Assistant, read the story Jumping the Broom and showed the class pictures that accompanied each passage. She asked periodic questions such as “what day is this?” and “who is the flower girl?” Alicia also modeled strategies such as syllabication that help readers move forward when an unfamiliar word was found.In the session focused on working with words, the teacher aims to “ensure that children read, spell, and use high-frequency words correctly, and that they learn the patterns necessary for decoding and spelling" (Cunningham, Hall and Sigmon, 1999). One activity is a game called “I spy”. A ball is thrown to a student who is asked, “what do you spy?” by classmates. The student responds by walking to the wall, choosing a word from the word wall and saying it aloud. Classmates indicate if the student is correct and assist if the word is incorrectly identified. The process is repeated when the selected student throws the ball to another student. The word wall includes the words students encountered during reading and thus plays a crucial role in supporting vocabulary building.Students were also supported in how to decode words through the following strategies:

• Visual scrutiny – examining the shape of the words, looking at high letters and low letters;
• Syllabication  – breaking words into parts; and
• Context clues – using the context to help them identify other words in the sentence.

Guided reading is an instructional strategy focused on fostering comprehension skills and developing background knowledge and oral skills. It requires the teacher to choose “material for children to read and a purpose for reading, and then guide them to use reading strategies needed for that material and that purpose” (Cunningham, Hall and Sigmon). Eulalee Willis Roberts, CSP Academic Leader, explained that the guided reading session is when CSP students “go into the book, find the words and read along, using different clues”. Eulalee keeps a reading tip on the board – ‘good readers try to find word parts’, and she explains that the students "try to find word parts and practice”. Independent reading provides students an opportunity to practice the strategies they have learned by reading on their own with materials that match their reading level.Guided writing involves supporting developing writers by familiarizing them with the writing process. One classroom activity involved developing an advertisement for an event. The writing process began with creating a story web, where students answered the critical questions of what, when, who and where. Then students were guided through the process of drafting, editing and publishing, which are skills needed in everyday life.ReferencesCarson-Dellosa Publishing Co (2001). The four blocks literacy model. Retrieved from http://www.four-blocks.com/index.htmSEDL. Afterschool training toolkit – abc literacy practice: Read aloud. Retrieved from http://www.sedl.org/afterschool/toolkits/literacy/pr_read_aloud.html