Early Literacy: Building a Strong Foundation

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Early Literacy Building a Strong Foundation
Dr. Denise P. Gibbs, Director Alabama Scottish
Rite Foundation Learning Centers gibbsdenise_at_ao
l.com
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In this session, we will.

• get familiar with essential early literacy
  skills including oral language, print concepts
  (experiences with books) and phonological
  awareness.
• Learn about techniques, which can be used in
  every day interactions with children to stimulate
  oral language development.
• Learn about techniques, which can be used in
  every day interactions with children to stimulate
  development of early print concepts.
• Learn about techniques, which can be used in
  every day interactions with children to stimulate
  phonological awareness skills.

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Emergent Literacy Infants environment

• Skills which lead to literacy begin in earliest
  infancy as the baby has..
• interactions involving talking
• interactions involving print

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Five Key Environmental Factors

• Good language partners
• Positive experiences with print
• Phonological awareness and letter recognition
• Family attitudes
• Effective storybook activities.

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Importance of early experiences

• Research indicates that the environment of
  infants, toddlers, and preschoolers plays a
  critical role in their successful reading
  development.
• What we do every day (from the daywe bring them
  home from the hospital) really matters!

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Creating positive experiences involving talking

• Talk or sing during most interactions with the
  baby.
• Do use correct speech sounds-NO BABY TALK
• Dont use long sentences
• Do talk/sing directly TO the baby
• Do use a gentle and loving tone of voice
• Make intonation interesting and varied
• Do say babys name often! (it cues them to listen
  to what comes next as they get older)

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Never too young for positive experiences with
talking
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Creating positive experiences involving talking

• Some things to say.
• While changing a diaper
• Ooo, Cam youre wet! Wet-all dry, stinky-all
  clean, wet diaper, stinky diaper, clean diaper
• Change your diaper-all done
• While giving a bottle
• Time to eat, youre hungry, hungry baby, mmmm
  good milk, all gone milk

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Create positive experiences involving talking

• While giving a bath
• Water, soap, wash your arm, wash your leg, wash
  your
• All clean, towel, dry your.

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Create positive experiences involving talking

• While feeding
• Mmmm yum carrots!
• More carrots
• Want some carrots
• Another bite
• Eat carrots
• All gone carrots

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Create positive experiences involving talking

• While holding or rocking
• SING!
• Snuggle
• speak your heart I love you. youre a big boy,
  my sweet baby, I love youre fingers, sweet
  little fingers

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Create positive experiences involving talking
Morgan-3 yrsCam-3 mo

• Include siblings/cousins!
• Babies liketo listen to people who are
  closerto their size!

Cam-3 yrsAubrey-17 mo
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Good language partners provide indirect language
stimulation

• Indirect language stimulation do not tell the
  child to say this or to say that!
• Child may withdraw from speaking due to the
  pressure to perform.
• Do provide words to frame the childs play and
  activities.

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Indirect language stimulation techniques

• Parallel Talk (child-centered)
• Adult describes what the child is doing, hearing,
  seeing, etc as he does it
• Youre building the fence.
• You see the horse.
• (adult gives the child 4-5 words to describe the
  action that child is involved in)

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Indirect language stimulation techniques

• Self-Talk (adult-centered)
• Adult describes what she is doing, hearing,
  seeing, etc as she does it
• Im washing your foot.
• I got the soap
• (give the child words for what he sees you doing)

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Indirect language stimulation techniques

• Description (object-centered)
• Adult describes the objects the child sees or
  interacts with.
• That car is broken.
• That block is big.
• (give the child words to describe things he
  seems to be interested in looking at)

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Indirect language stimulation techniques

• Comments
• Adult gives information or describes upcoming
  activities.
• We are going to go outside.
• We need to put on our shoes.
• This is our new friend.
• (provides words to help the child begin to think
  with words)

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Indirect language stimulation techniques

• Open-ended questions (can not be answered yes or
  no nor with a single word answer)
• Adult asks questions to get the child to
  verbalize their thinking.
• What do you think will happen if the lid gets
  stuck?
• I wonder what we use this thing for?

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Indirect language stimulation techniques

• Expansion
• Adult repeats the childs short sentences or
  single-word utterances as an adult would have
  said them.
• Child says ball
• Adult says It is a ball.
• Child says doggy run
• Adult says Yes, the doggy is running.
• (Lets the child know you understood them and
  that you were paying attention!)

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Indirect language stimulation techniques

• Expansion Plus
• Adult lengthens the childs short sentences or
  single word utterances and adds a new bit of
  information.
• Child says ball
• Adult says It is a ball. Its a red ball
• (Lets child know you understood them and have
  words to say more soon!)

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Indirect language stimulation techniques

• Repetition
• When child says something with speech sound
  errors, the adult repeats the utterance with
  correct sounds.
• Child says wed wabbit
• Adult says red rabbit
• (Lets child hear correct sounds without being
  corrected.)

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Use everything in the environment for language
learning
Pets! Anything that moves is interesting
Cooking! Snack time
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A word about vocabulary and ses.

• Average child from welfare family hears about 3
  million words per year while average child from
  professional family hears about 11 million words
  per year.
• By age 4 the gap is 13 to 45 million words heard!
• Child from professional family speaks more than
  adult from welfare family
• (Hart and Risley, 1995)

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Creating positive experiences involving print

• Start book play early.
• Earliest books need to
• Have good pictures of familiar things
• Not have page clutter
• Be durable!
• Be played-with every day (over and over and
  over)

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Creating positive experiences involving print

• Lets see some in sequence.
• Single items on page with very familiar things
• Multiple pictures on the page but separated
• Touchy Feely
• Repetitive and predictable
• Rhyme
• Tag - Big brother reading to little brothers!

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(No Transcript)
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(No Transcript)
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Touchy Feely Books Adjectives
Repetitive Familiar things
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Familiar and connected And rhyming!
Repetitive and predictableandrhyming
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Children sharing books

• What is Morgan doing?
• What is Jordan doing?
• Can you tell what Cameron is doing?

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Tag (from Leap Frog) Morgan can read to his
brothers!
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Dialogic Reading the right way to do books

• First described by Whitehurst in 1988.
• Wonderful way to use books for
• Language growth
• Social connection
• Positive print experiences

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Dialogic Reading Little one takes the lead

• Dont worry about the baby not sitting still.
• Coming and going is really fine!

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Dialogic Reading Question types-CROWD

• C Completion questions (e.g., Baby bear said,
  somebody's been sleeping in my bed and________!)
• R Recall questions (e.g., Can you remember what
  happened to baby bear's chair?)
• O Open-ended questions (e.g., What is happening
  in this picture?)
• W Wh-questions (e.g., Who ate baby bear's
  porridge?)
• D Distancing questions to connect to world
  knowledge (e.g., Have you ever been for a walk in
  the woods? Tell me about your walk.)

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Dialogic Reading PEER

• P Prompt - Ask child to respond to the story
  through using any of the CROWD questions. (e.g.,
  Can you remember what happened to baby bear's
  chair? Student answers It got broken.)
• E Evaluate - Evaluate or affirm a childs
  response. (e.g., That's right.)
• E Expand Add information to the child's
  response. (e.g., Goldilocks sat in it and it got
  broken.)
• R Repeat Ask the child to repeat your
  expanded comment. (e.g., Can you say that?)

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Bed-time storiesGood Night Moon yet again!

• What things happen during these minutes?

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Thats Not My Tractor
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How about phonological awareness and then
phonemic awareness

• Thinking about words
• Words in phrases
• Words in sentences
• Thinking about syllables
• Compound words
• Two syllable words
• Thinking about sounds
• Rhyming words
• First sound in the word

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Powerful (and fun) Phonological Awareness Tool

• Goldsworthy, C.L. (1998). A Sourcebook of
  Phonological Awareness Activities Childrens
  Classic Literature

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Goldilocks and the Three Bears

• Word-level activities
• Counting words
• That chair is too soft.
• Identifying missing words
• forest, window, flowers / window flowers
• Identifying missing words in phrase/sentence
• Goldilocks woke up at once. / Goldilocks woke up
  at __.
• Supplying word
• She tasted the porridge in the big __.
• Rearranging words
• Girl little I sleepy am three Goldilocks and
  bears the

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Goldilocks and the Three Bears

• Syllable-level activities (use pictures from the
  story and print contexts)
• Syllable counting
• Papa, nobody, porridge, chair, shiny, middle,
  Goldilocks
• Syllable deleting
• Say bedroom without bed say sleeping without
  -ing
• Syllable adding
• Add stairs to the end of up add est to the end
  of for
• Syllable reversing
• Add some to the end of body (bodysome) what do
  you think the word was before we switched the
  parts
• Syllable substituting
• Say asleep. Instead of sleep, say cross (across)

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Goldilocks and the Three Bears

• Phoneme-level activities 25 different types of
  activities
• Beginning with sound matching (initial)
• Includes sound blending, recognizing and
  producing rhyme
• Identifying and matching sounds at the beginning,
  middle, and end of words
• Concludes with deleting sounds, pig Latin, and
  phoneme switching.

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Report of the National Early Literacy Panel
(NELP) 200911 Skills and Abilities that Predict
Literacy Success

• alphabet knowledge (AK)
• knowledge of the names and sounds associated
  with printed letters
• phonological awareness (PA)
• the ability to detect, manipulate, or analyze
  the auditory aspects of spoken language
  (including the ability to distinguish or segment
  words, syllables, or phonemes), independent of
  meaning
• rapid automatic naming (RAN) of letters or
  digits
• the ability to rapidly name a sequence of random
  letters or digits

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Report of the National Early Literacy Panel
(NELP) 200911 Skills and Abilities that Predict
Literacy Success

• RAN of objects or colors
• the ability to rapidly name a sequence of
  repeating random sets of pictures of objects
  (e.g., car, tree, house, man) or colors
• writing or writing name
• the ability to write letters in isolation on
  request or to write ones own name
• phonological memory
• the ability to remember spoken information for a
  short period of time.

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Report of the National Early Literacy Panel
(NELP) 200911 Skills and Abilities that Predict
Literacy Success

• concepts about print
• knowledge of print conventions (e.g., leftright,
  frontback) and concepts (book cover, author,
  text)
• print knowledge
• a combination of elements of AK, concepts about
  print, and early decoding
• .

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Report of the National Early Literacy Panel
(NELP) 200911 Skills and Abilities that Predict
Literacy Success

• reading readiness
• usually a combination of AK, concepts of print,
  vocabulary, memory, and PA
• oral language
• the ability to produce or comprehend spoken
  language, including vocabulary and grammar
• visual processing
• the ability to match or discriminate visually
  presented symbols.

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Some awesome resources
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Preschool Early Literacy Assessment Tools

• Test of Preschool Early Literacy
• Authors Lonigan, Wagner, Torgesen Rashotte
• Publisher ProEd www.proedinc.com
• Ages 3 yrs to 5 yrs 11 mos.
• Assesses print knowledge, definitional
  vocabulary, and phonological awareness
• Provides standard scores to compare childs
  performance to same-age peers

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Preschool Early Literacy Assessment Tools

• Individual Growth Development Indicators (IGDIs)
  http//igdis.umn.edu
• Picture naming, alliteration, rhyming
• Ages 3-5
• Can graph results and provides instructional
  suggestions

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Get Ready to Read(www.GetReadytoRead.org)

• 20 question early literacy online screening test
• Literacy environment checklists
• Literacy activities and materials
• Print knowledge
• Emergent Writing
• Listening (phonological) awareness

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Read Together, Talk Together Kit A and Kit B

• Materials for dialogic reading!
• Kit A for 2-3 year-olds / Kit B for 4-5 year-olds
• Includes 20 picture books
• both fiction and nonfiction titles
• Teacher and Parent Notes for each book
• Program Handbook explaining the dialogic reading
  technique
• Teacher Training Video
• Parent Training Video

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Every Child Ready to Read Literacy Tips for
Parents (Lee Pesky Learning Center)

• Topics are individually tailored for three age
  rangesinfant, toddler, and preschooland
  include
• read-aloud books to develop sound awareness
• perfect picture books for encouraging letter
  knowledge
• ways to promote verbal language and build
  vocabulary
• the benefits of symbolic play
• fun (and educational) games for car trips
• helping youngsters write at home
• Literacy gift ideas for kids
• warning signs of a learning disability

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Thank you!gibbsdenise_at_aol.com