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As I walked my 2-year-old granddaughter into preschool recently, I had a dream: that every poverty-level child in America would be enrolled in a vocabulary-intensive preschool like hers before the age of 2.
Why this dream? Because at the age of 2, the "word gap" between a child in poverty and a child in the middle or upper class is only 100 to 200 words.
Compare this to the age of 5, when, without vocabulary enhancement, the word gap explodes exponentially and sometimes irretrievably.
I would like to see the parents themselves chattering with their children - not just the folk running the pre-schools.
I encourage teachers to tell parents explicitly just HOW important masses of talking is with their children - especially in these days of electronic entertainment where children are not necessarily directly 'engaged' in oral conversations via screens but merely observers at best.
Last edited by debbie on Mon Feb 03, 2014 9:39 am, edited 1 time in total.
Great explanation for the importance of spoken language with our teeny tots!
Does your child have the skills they need to read?
Posted by Pamela Snow | Monday 3 February 2014, 03:45 PM (EST)
If you are a parent of young children, please do find the time to read the full article.
The ability to share information via the written word is probably one of humankind’s greatest achievements. Imagine life without the written word – you actually can’t imagine it, because reading and writing are utterly fundamental to our day-to-day existence. Perhaps that’s why it’s easy for us to take learning to read for granted and not afford it the awe and respect it deserves. We are biologically “pre-programmed” to learn to talk – provided we have the necessary organs and are exposed to a reasonable amount of talking to, and around us in infancy and the early years.
Learning how to read, however, is a different matter altogether. It is biologically unnatural and requires years of specific instruction, followed by even more years (decades in fact) of further refinement.
It’s easy to be fooled into thinking that learning how to read is a visual task, because it involves looking at words on a page and turning them into spoken words – initially spoken aloud, but later “in the head”. In fact, visual skills are only a small part of the process. Sure, children use their visual skills to look at the printed word and to scan from left to right across the page, but the heavy lifting in learning to read is overwhelmingly done by the child’s language skills.
An interesting article for parents in the ABC magazine - including some history of the English language and reference to some aspects of teaching phonics.
Helping children learn to read and write is easier when you know a bit more about the nuts and bolts of the process - the alphabet, our speech sounds and how our brain copes with it. Here Marian Cleary - a trained literacy teacher and reading therapist - unpicks it all.
I wanted to call this article 'goodbye ABC' but for obvious reasons that was not such a good idea in this magazine! However, this just about sums up how reading instruction is moving away from being tied to concepts about the traditional alphabet when it comes to reading and writing.
Only a few civilisations have developed written language. Our written language form comes from the Phoenician civilisation, in existence a few thousand years ago. The Etruscans and Greeks borrowed it and adapted it and the Romans followed with their own take on the symbols. It is from this that we now mainly inherited our English alphabet. Our ABC.
Having read the article, parents might be helped by selecting one of the free Alphabetic Code Charts which outline a comprehensive alphabetic code and provide guidance and information:
'Studies show link between speaking to babies and their future performance in school'
Speaking directly to a baby or reading a bedtime story has a direct impact on how well they will do in school and possibly their career in later life, according to child psychologists who warned against using TVs and iPads as babysitters.
When the Guardian ran a piece last week on the latest of these studies, someone tweeted "do we really need a study to demonstrate that?" – to most people it's blindingly obvious that children's language development will be determined by the language that they hear at home. This assumption is shared by many professionals in the field of language development; for instance, in a recent review, Leffel and Suskind (2013)
describe poor attainment of children from disadvantaged homes and unambiguously state: "Parent linguistic input lies at the heart of the problem".
Except that it's not so simple. And the complexities become apparent when we look at the type of evidence that we have, which is mostly correlational.
THE more parents talk to their children, the faster those children’s vocabularies grow and the better their intelligence develops. That might seem blindingly obvious, but it took until 1995 for science to show just how early in life the difference begins to matter. In that year Betty Hart and Todd Risley of the University of Kansas published the results of a decade-long study in which they had looked at how, and how much, 42 families in Kansas City conversed at home. Dr Hart and Dr Risley found a close correlation between the number of words a child’s parents had spoken to him by the time he was three and his academic success at the age of nine. At three, children born into professional families had heard 30m more words than those from a poorer background.
Is kindergarten getting to be too academically challenging—or not challenging enough?
Here on the Brilliant Blog, I’ve written about concerns that many kindergarten classes are becoming too academically oriented, with too little time allocated for imaginative and unstructured play.
But I’ve also written about concerns that kindergarteners are being taught material that they already know.
This is a question which deserves some serious consideration!
This is a really good posting by a home-schooling father in the States - explaining the differences between 'sight recognition' and 'phonics' and how this affected his young daughter's short-term and long-term progress in reading:
By Elise Baker, University of Sydney and Natalie Munro, University of Sydney
Babies are born communicating. Their cries and coos speak volumes. However, much-anticipated first words do not appear until 12 months later. By 18 months, the average child says about 50 words. By the time a child is ready to start school, their vocabulary will be an estimated 2,300 to 4,700 words.
Speech and language development takes time. Speech gradually becomes easier to understand; language gradually becomes more sophisticated.
Problems arise when speech and language milestones are not met. Left untreated, children who start school with speech and language difficulties face an increased risk of reading and writing difficulties, more bullying, poorer peer relationships and less enjoyment of school. So, what should parents expect of children at different ages?