Tuesday, September 29, 2015

Watching Kindergarten Mentor Teachers Share Their Knowledge of Literacy and Learning


Teachers Talking about Literacy in Their Kindergarten Classes

Video is about 30 minutes: With Sharon, Bonnie Angela and Jonna—mentor teachers.

Lots of wonderful do-able ideas about early literacy

Monday, September 14, 2015

A Language Rich Preschool Classroom?


 
Creating Language Rich Preschool Classrooms, Laura Justice (2004)


A short excerpt

Do children at your preschool have strong language and literacy skills?

Do children with language disabilities participate in general preschool classrooms?

Do educators at your school collaborate in language-rich curriculums?

Do you have sufficient funding for a quality preschool program? These are broad, ambitious questions,

and we hope to set you on your way to answering them and ensuring the success of all the children in your

preschool program.

 

What Does the Literature Say About Language-Rich Classrooms

 
It is, of course, one thing to know what a language-rich classroom environment looks like and another thing to put one’s ideas and intentions into everyday practice….”

 
Exposure

Deliberateness

Recurrence
High quality input

Adult responsiveness

Wednesday, September 9, 2015

Conversation and Reading


 
Brain Development and Bed Time Stories

Dr. Perri Klass on family health.

A short excerpt
“A little more than a year ago, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a policy statement saying that all pediatric primary care should include literacy promotion, starting at birth.

That means pediatricians taking care of infants and toddlers should routinely be advising parents about how important it is to read to even very young children. The policy statement, which I wrote with Dr. Pamela C. High, included a review of the extensive research on the links between growing up with books and reading aloud, and later language development and school success”

Dialogic Reading:

Dialogic Reading: An Effective Way to Read to Preschoolers  By: Grover J. (Russ) Whitehurst
A short excerpt:

“Dialogic reading works. Children who have been read to dialogically are substantially ahead of children who have been read to traditionally on tests of language development. Children can jump ahead by several months in just a few weeks of dialogic reading.  From Reading Rockets

Over a third of children in the U.S. enter school unprepared to learn. They lack the vocabulary, sentence structure, and other basic skills that are required to do well in school. Children who start behind generally stay behind – they drop out, they turn off. Their lives are at risk.

Why are so many children deficient in the skills that are critical to school readiness?

Children's experience with books plays an important role. Many children enter school with thousands of hours of experience with books. Their homes contain hundreds of picture books. They see their parents and brothers and sisters reading for pleasure. Other children enter school with fewer than 25 hours of shared book reading. There are few if any children's books in their homes. Their parents and siblings aren't readers….”
Some video examples of Dialogic Reading

One with One Reading: “Machines at Work”


Small Group Reading:  “Something From Nothing”


 Reading stories to 2 and 3 year olds:  “Goodnight Gorilla”