2..) Children start to learn language from the day they are born. As they grow and develop, their language and speech skills become increasingly more complex. Children learn to understand and use language to express their ideas thoughts and feelings to communicate with others. Children move through three stages as they learn to both read and write; emergent, beginning and fluent. The stage known as emergent literacy begins at birth and continues through the preschool years. Children see and interact with print in everyday situations well before they start elementary school. I worked with my own children when they were young. I can remember driving in the car pointing out stop signs, traffic lights, stores, restaurants, billboards, police cars, schools etc. The list goes on and on. We would read from the car all the time. That is how they began to connect words to items and ideas. The stage know as beginning literacy children learn phoneme-grapheme correspondences as they begin to decode and spell words. I work with my kindergartener everyday helping her practice her sight words and singing her songs to spell her colors. The stage known as fluent literacy children have learned how to read and write and now can concentrate more on comprehension in reading and composing paragraphs in writing. 3.) Some strategies teachers use in teaching reading and writing are shared reading, the language experience approach and interactive writing. Shared reading is an interactive reading experience that occurs when students join in or share the reading of a big book or other text while guided by a teacher. Cross-aged reading buddies is another way teachers use shared reading. This is when older students are paired up with younger students to read to each other .I think this is a very effective strategy to help younger children become more confident in reading aloud. These kind of strategies were not used when I was in elementary school. I was not a very good reader, especially reading aloud. Maybe a strategy like this would have helped me and some of the other weak readers in my class. Traveling bags of books is another way to encourage shared reading. This way involves parents by reading the selected books from the bag at home. This was one of my daughters favorite activities when she was in kindergarten. She would bring home a backpack with books and related activities for us to do at home. She wanted to read the books and do the activities every night. The language experience approach is based on activities and stories developed from personal experiences of the learner. Stories about personal experiences are written down by the teacher then read together until the students associate the written form of the words with what has been read. I think this is beneficial to students because it brings writing, reading, art and language together. Interactive writing is another good way to teach reading and writing. This allows students and teachers to work together to plan and construct text. This activity is teacher guided but allows students to have some control of the writing.