Thursday, November 20, 2008

Language Skills

How do we help kids coming into kindergarten to develop more language skills? They are coming into kindergarten with not enough language skills.

4 comments:

Sanoe said...

1. Suggest to parents to talk to their child every moment they can, dinner, bathroom, driving, walk n talk, any time is a good time to create a conversation.

2. Send home a homework log with a conversational sentence to start conversations.

3. Do an activity and talk about the process.

4. Encourage parents to be involved with the education of their child.

5. Have teachers visit homes.

6. Provide parent literacy workshop.

7. Morning circle songs to be sent home so parents can sing to child as well.

8. Lower leveled books that parents can read to child.

9. Info pamphlets on the importance of reading (awareness)

10. Create commercials that encourage conversation building, and or make a video dialogue on how to talk with child.

11. Ask open-ended questions

12. Networking, Parent to parent conversations, word of mouth advertising, Example: Parent who has been in Keiki Steps tells another parent how good it is, and so the program is talked about thru the networking of parents

13. Teacher build a strong communication with parents to keep the parents aware of how their child is progressing.

LaurieAnn said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
LaurieAnn said...

There are many literacy activities we can do. I am in favor of activities that build emerging literacy skills, like children's drawings and nonsensical letters. After reading stories to my students, I asked to them draw their favorite part in the story. Parents can do this with them too. I once had a student write a bunch of letters next to her drawing--the letters didn't spell anything. I asked her what she drew, she put her fingers over the letters and said, "Train." Her drawing also resembled a train. While she did not correctly spell T-R-A-I-N, she understood that letters correspond with images to give them meaning. These are the kind of emerging literacy skills that I encourage because they are the foundation for later literacy development. If I focused more on correct spelling, she would lose that important connection she was making between letters and images.

We as teachers and parents need ot understand literacy development so we don't dismiss the critical connections children are already making in the early years just because they don't get it "right." What might seem like mistakes might actually be important developmental stones we should be encouraging in our keiki.

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