Early Literacy: Building a Strong Foundation

1. Early Literacy: Building a Strong Foundation Dr. Denise P. Gibbs, Director Alabama Scottish Rite Foundation Learning Centers gibbsdenise@aol.com

2. 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.

3. Emergent Literacy: Infant’s environment… • Skills which lead to literacy begin in earliest infancy as the baby has.. • interactions involving talking • interactions involving print

4. Five Key Environmental Factors… • “Good” language partners • “Positive” experiences with print • Phonological awareness and letter recognition • Family attitudes • “Effective” storybook activities.

5. 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!

6. Creating positive experiences involving talking • Talk or sing during most interactions with the baby. • Do use correct speech sounds-”NO BABY TALK” • Don’t 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 baby’s name often! (it cues them to listen to what comes next as they get older)

7. Never too young for positive experiences with talking

8. Creating positive experiences involving talking • Some things to say…. • While changing a diaper • Ooo, Cam you’re 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, you’re hungry, hungry baby, mmmm good milk, all gone milk

9. Create positive experiences involving talking • While giving a bath • Water, soap, wash your arm, wash your leg, wash your… • All clean, towel, dry your….

10. Create positive experiences involving talking • While feeding • Mmmm yum carrots! • More carrots • Want some carrots • Another bite • Eat carrots • All gone carrots

11. Create positive experiences involving talking While holding or rocking • SING! • Snuggle • speak your heart – I love you. you’re a big boy, my sweet baby, I love you’re fingers, sweet little fingers

12. Create positive experiences involving talking • Include siblings/cousins! • Babies liketo listen to people who are closerto their size! Morgan-3 yrsCam-3 mo Cam-3 yrsAubrey-17 mo

13. 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 child’s play and activities.

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

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

16. 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)

17. 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)

18. 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?

19. Indirect language stimulation techniques • Expansion • Adult repeats the child’s 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!)

20. Indirect language stimulation techniques • Expansion Plus • Adult lengthens the child’s short sentences or single word utterances and adds a new bit of information. • Child says “ball” • Adult says “It is a ball. It’s a red ball” (Lets child know you understood them and have words to say more soon!)

21. 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”.)

22. Use everything in the environment for language learning Pets! Anything that moves is interesting Cooking! Snack time

23. 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)

24. 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)

25. Creating positive experiences involving print • Let’s 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!

28. Touchy Feely Books Adjectives Repetitive Familiar things

29. Familiar and connected And rhyming! Repetitive and predictableandrhyming

30. Children sharing books • What is Morgan doing? • What is Jordan doing? • Can you tell what Cameron is doing?

31. Tag (from Leap Frog) – Morgan can read to his brothers!

32. 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

33. Dialogic Reading – Little one takes the lead • Don’t worry about the baby not “sitting still. • Coming and going is really fine!

34. 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.)

35. 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 child’s 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?)

36. Bed-time stories…Good Night Moon …yet again! • What things happen during these minutes?

37. That’s Not My Tractor

38. 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

39. Powerful (and fun) Phonological Awareness Tool • Goldsworthy, C.L. (1998). A Sourcebook of Phonological Awareness Activities: Children’s Classic Literature

40. 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

41. 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)

42. 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.

43. 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

44. 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 one’s own name • phonological memory: • the ability to remember spoken information for a short period of time.

45. 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., left–right, front–back) and concepts (book cover, author, text) • print knowledge: • a combination of elements of AK, concepts about print, and early decoding • .

46. 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.

47. Some awesome resources

48. 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 child’s performance to same-age peers

49. 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

50. 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