Concepts of Print and the Emergent Reader

In Wednesday's Emergent Literacy class we discussed the article Examining the Concept of Learning to Look at Print.  This brought up the discussion of how primary teachers use the concepts of print and if we feel that it is used effectively in our schools.  I feel that concepts of print is a skill that is easily overlooked by teachers of emergent learners.  When I first started teaching kindergarten (having taught first, third, and fifth grades before) and I looked at the pre-assessment, I thought it was crazy that we were asking children to show us the front and back covers of a book.  Surely, I thought, a five-year-old knows that!  Boy, was I wrong.  Yes, the children who have been read to at home do have concepts of print.  However, not all children come to us having been read aloud to at home.  This is a skill that is easily taken for granted.  My second year teaching kindergarten, we got a new principal.  She herself had never taught primary age children.  But she did her research and realized that in order for our inner-city, Mississippi children to keep up with the Common Core and the rest of the country, we needed to revamp our kindergarten program.  One way we did this was by creating two separate whole group reading blocks.  The first one was your traditional kindergarten reading lessons, a  read aloud and introductions of letters and sounds, followed by literacy centers.  At the end of the day we had another reading block.  This was a concepts of print block.  Using a big book I explicitly modeled one concept of print each day.  For example, the first week of school I would say something like:  "This is a book.  How many of you have touched a book before?"  Unfortunately not as many hands went up as you would think.  Using what I was observing about my children's experience with books, I created print concepts lessons focused around what they needed.  These five minute lessons were followed up with independent reading time.  We were building our "stamina" as I told my students.  We started with looking at books for one minute.  A couple of weeks later it was two minutes.  By the end of the year, my students no longer needed explicit instruction of print concepts.   This was just an independent reading time.  My kindergartners who had never touched a book before their first week in kindergarten could now (most of them) sit and look at books for between 10-15 minutes.  This may not sound like a big accomplishment to many upper grade teachers.  However, at the beginning of the year these specific children may have been looking at books upside down, pointing to words from top to bottom, skipping pages, randomly pointing at the page instead of pointing at words, etc.  Yes, these children would have eventually picked this up.  But I feel that reading instruction is enhanced and accelerated if teachers take the time to explicitly teach concepts of print.