Weaving Possibilities: Rethinking Metaphors for Early Literacy Development. Occasional Paper No. 19.

Imagine a teacher's kindergarten classroom in an ethnically and socially diverse urban school. One of her central literacy activities is storymaking-a "holistic" rather than an "isolated letter" activity. The children all have books in which they draw pictures and then dictate or write their own tales. But one of the teacher's children, Kim, has other ideas about how to fill this learning space, this curricular activity. She is in fact most interested in making isolated letters and numbers. On this day, the teacher has helped Kim make a plan for her journal: Kim is going to draw her family. Kim makes a row of faces. She begins another row with what seems to be another face and one side of the hair-but then she makes a discovery. It is, she announces, "a 9, a little 9." She then makes a string of seemingly similar shapes that are 9's, lower-case Q's or G's (see Figure 1). As she works, she talks to herself: