Pre-service Teacher Candidates Learn the Many Values of Home-School Literacy Bags

This article shares an innovative learning assignment that pre-service teacher candidates completed to support early childhood students in the area of emergent literacy. To learn the many values of home-school literacy bags, teacher candidates enrolled in a university teacher preparation course designed homemade literacy bags and brought them into their preschool field classrooms and distributed them to the preschoolers’ families. The author shares the rationale behind the assignment, the processes and strategies the students used to create the home-school literacy bags, the results of the parent satisfaction survey that was collected, and the pre-service teacher candidates’ reactions and reflections of the learning assignment.