This exploratory study describes the instructional strategies and related activities a first grade teacher and I used to promote engagements with an informational text in one rural Jamaican primary school. Some of the instructional strategies and activities which we used included making connections as a bridge from the known to the unknown, read-alouds, echo and choral readings to increase content knowledge and expand vocabulary and look-backs to gather and write important facts about bananas.

This article describes a literacy initiative for basic school children. It is about young children, teachers, and literature books for children in the basic schools in Zone 40, Clarendon, Jamaica. It is a grassroots project involving approximately 60 teachers in 34 basic schools who collectively teach about 2,200 children, 3-6 years of age. The purpose of this initiative was to infuse literature for children and related literacy strategies into a read-aloud programme to promote the literacy development of young children in the zone.