Monday, January 11, 2010

"Kindergarteners Learn Literacy Through Yuraq"


I wrote this article about Yup'ik dancing and it was published in the Delta Discovery in December, 2009.






Teacher Noel Kairaiuak of Chefornak has found a way to connect students’ cultural traditions of song and dance to develop academic skills. She brings her kindergarten students to a local elder, Maria Kairaiuak’s, house where the children learn a Yup’ik dance, the words of the song and the corresponding motions. The kindergarteners watch the elder intently and practice the motions that illustrate the main events of the story.

Through the learning the songs, these young children gain a rich oral language experience and learn the motions that help them create meaning through the song and dance, as they develop their oral language.

Maria Kairaiuak is teaching the children a song about a gathering mouse food. The children depict a story about some people who go hunting for mouse food. Traveling out to the tundra, they find a mouse house and open it up to gather the mouse food. After putting the mouse food in the nap-sack, the people return home. On the way, they see two people and speak with them. They tell the two people where they can find mouse food. They leave the two people they met and continue their journey home. When they arrive, they open their backpack and share their harvest with the people who are at home.

The students practice the gestures in the song represent the sequence of events in the story. The physical movements keep all students engaged and actively participating in learning.

Kairaiuak noticed that the kindergarteners have made great improvements since they started going the elder’s house in October. She describes how the children benefit from the high level of language input. She states that the elder speaks “a more complex and traditional form of Yup’ik and this strengthens their language development, which helps build a strong foundation for academic growth.” She adds, “It is very important to expose children to the proper vocabulary and sentence structure of Yup’ik.” Additionally, Yup’ik values of sharing the harvest are integrated in this lesson as students develop expressive language skills.

Ayuprun Elitnaurvik kindergarten teacher, Sally Samson says, “Yuraq is writing with our bodies.” Samson, who recently finished a Masters program in linguistics from the UAF, researched the connection between Yup’ik dance and orthography in her thesis entitled “Yuraq: An Introduction to Writing.” Samson found that through the process of teaching Yup’ik dance she could link to writing “because it helped students understand that they are telling a story through dance, and we explored those stories further in our lessons.” From these experiences, children are able to link Yuraq with writing.

Samson based her work on research that shows reading and writing should be introduced right at the beginning of language learning to help learners connect written language with spoken language.

Both Samson and Kairaiuak teach in a Yup'ik immersion program and integrate Yuraq into the curriculum as a precursor to writing instruction help to develop writing skills. Kairaiuak notes that learning dance and songs from the elder helps the children gain an understanding of a sense of story.

According to Samson, “Yuraq helps learners develop voice, ideas, word choice and organization,” which are part of the Six-trait writing program of LKSD. She also found her research increased her awareness of the complex ways in which her young students learn literacy and language.


Kindergarten students are now finding greater success in writing, especially students who may have had difficulties in developing their writing skills, because now they are actively engaged in the writing process and it is linked to their cultural experiences. Students can easily see the connection between the sequences of events in the song and the corresponding gestures, which help children make connections to what they do in reading and writing. Integrating Yuraq has helped these teachers develop lessons to teach writing and reading as they meet the needs of the children in a developmentally appropriate way.

Photos by David Neave, LKSD social worker

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