Hi Parents! I am excited to share with you some fun tips of how you can incorporate literacy into your everyday routines this summer to help prepare your children for kindergarten. Beginning to read is a key component in your child’s development.
Environmental Print is printed material that is part of your everyday life. There are tons of great games and activities that you can do with environmental print with your kids. When you are driving around town talk to your kids about the different signs they see and see if they can name different restaurants or businesses based on their signs.
Attach pictures and logos of your children’s favorite places to their blocks. Help them create a town using their favorite things. They can be creative and make up an imaginary town or they can try to duplicate what they see in their own town. Either way, this is a great way to introduce print concepts to your child. If blocks are not your child’s thing, use large Lego’s or ad signs to their Matchbox cars and trucks.
When you go to the grocery store, see if your kids can find their favorite foods based on their logos or environmental print. Create a visual list for your kids to use to help grocery shop. To do this, save the empty boxes of cereal, crackers, etc. Then cut out the labels and tape them to a piece of paper. Your kids will have to recognize the label of the food and find the matching food in the store.
Use their favorite toys (Lego’s, Barbie, Batman, etc) and create a matching game for them by taking a Toys 'R Us circular and cutting out the labels and matching them to the picture of the actual toy. This same game can be done with food labels and pictures.
Create an environmental print book for them to read. Use boxes and bags from your kitchen and punch holes in them and tie them with string. Your children can create their own environmental print in your house by labeling things that are important to them.
Environmental print is such a great learning tool for your children because it is everywhere and they can have learning experiences everywhere! Take some time to look at the video and help your child identify all the signs for Moser the Monkey.
Be on the look-out for next week’s post for parents on how to help your child prepare for their first day of kindergarten.
This year marks our third year of our SIG Grant at Oak Hill Elementary and we are focusing heavily on literacy. With this in mind I am developing a few activities to implement as we begin the school year. During my graduate courses, I plan to learn as much as I can about increasing our kindergartners' vocabularies.
Kindergartners at Oak Hill working on reading skills.
Research seems to state that the achievement struggles in literacy stem from early childhood literacy skills and the lack of proper materials to aid in the learning of these literacy skills. Our school population has the deck stacked against them. The majority of our students entering kindergarten are not prepared and have never been to school. Nearly all (99.5%) of our school population qualifies for free or reduced lunch, and a very large percent of our students are English as a second language (ESL) learners.
"Low incomes children hear on average 30 million fewer words than their more affluent peers before the age of four, leading to a language deficit and low literacy." (Hart and Risley, 1995) Basically, a slow start to vocabulary in kindergarten will be an obstacle that becomes exponentially larger as the student travels up the grade levels. Each year the lower level vocabulary learner will fall further and further behind, widening the “gap.”
Reading First, Mary E. Dahlgren, Ed. D.
"Children whose family incomes are at or below the poverty level are especially likely to struggle with reading, a pattern that emerges early and strengthens in the elementary school years. On recent national assessments, only 43 percent of low income fourth-graders in large urban districts read at a basic level or higher." (Lutkus, Grigg, & Donahue, 2007).
So how can I make a difference with the
kindergarten students at Oak Hill Elementary School?
First, I would love to go beyond the sight word flash cards. I am going to infuse exciting technology into all the literacy-based learning that I can. I will use apps on the iPad such as Pocketphonics-Lite. As a resource, I have created virtual flash cards with vocabulary that we will need as we begin the year. With item words like 'chair' and 'desk,' I have an actual picture of that item and add the word by uploading it to an animoto file. I will use this resource as I embark on talk time with the ESL students. An iPhone app that I plan to use for this comes from voxy.com where they have an infographic.
Oak Hill Kindergartners at interactive board.
By providing more time and opportunities for students to read or be read to will help support language literacy. We can develop our own stories through the retelling of a book or poem through the use of iPads and iMovies. Or we can make short video clips to provide further instructional aids using Go!Animate and Animoto, as well as other applications. These expansions of activities will help increase the vocabulary development, as well as provide background knowledge for words as they progress as readers. Ideally, we are preparing them for the transition from learning to read to reading to learn.
Another way that we can incorporate more vocabulary infused activities is to provide as many opportunities as we can for hands on discovery of informational texts. "Research focusing on teacher dialogue and availability of classroom materials in low-income first grade classrooms found that teachers spent less than four minutes a day engaging their students with informational texts (kids’ newspapers, National Geographic articles on volcanoes or snakes), as these were often unavailable." (White, Claire E & Kim, James S. 2009)
Students need to be utilizing informational texts as a vehicle to facilitate conversations. This will help provide much needed background vocabulary, as well as knowledge of words that are around the student in the world. By increasing our talk time with content rich texts, students will increase background knowledge, as well as vocabulary development.
Students are much more likely to learn new words and retain their meanings when we attach a visual, as well as a hands-on activity for the word whenever possible. For example, I will help make vocabulary a part of daily activities. As we travel to the cafeteria, we may use different words for our trip each day, using tier two words such as journey, embark, traverse, amble, mosey, sanker, wander, traipse, etc.
I also want to create a rewards-based system that will challenge students to use ‘spectacular’ or ‘outstanding’ words instead of ordinary words. Whenever a child gets ‘caught using these words,’ they are going to be getting a word wizard sticker or stamp. I would also like to have a board, wall or chart in which I can keep a list of words kindergarten word wizards have used.
As we embark on a new school year at Oak Hill Elementary School, I thought it might be helpful to create a space where I can share ideas, links and examples to use during my time with students. Please feel free to share any comments or suggestions you may have along the way. This summer I am beginning a Masters of Teaching at High Point University. I am very excited to be returning to school (it has just been so long!). I am going to be proving that you can always learn a few new tricks! My first class is Advanced Technology for the 21st Century (EDU 5010), which is kind of ironic, don't you agree? When I finished undergrad, we didn't use the internet yet.
Technology is quickly becoming a foundation block in education from the kindergarten level on up. Nowhere is this more obvious than at Oak Hill Elementary. We have begun the task of restructuring to the new common core standards. Besides taking root in education, it is becoming increasingly obvious that technology is going to change todays classroom. "...[T]he State Board has approved new leadership standards for school administrators and new teacher standards, each aligned to better deliver the 21st Century skills students need to be competitive in the global economy."
In order to remain relevant in teaching, we are going to need to embrace modern technology and infuse it into our daily classroom. We, as teachers, are challenged with creating classrooms in which our walls are not barriers, but windows to the world. Students must learn about the global world today. We are challenged with creating classrooms that are always asking higher order questions and implementing higher level thinking within the classroom.
There are many ways we can use technology in our Kindergarten classrooms, including the use of iPads, computers and interactive smart boards. Through the use of these devices, we can work toward obtaining the 21st Century school model. During the course of this past school year, Oak Hill Elementary has integrated iPads into the classrooms. Each teacher can sign up for the iPads on a rotating basis. As a tutor, I saw students using iPads and was very impressed at their abilities to manipulate such new technology. "The K-12 generation is adept at using this technology, having grown up in a world steeped in digital media, so learning comes naturally in the context of interactive application and online social networking forums."
Another point that I found upon observation of the classroom using iPads was the intensity of the learning and the level of engagement that each child brought to this experience. Most students were engaged and tried very hard to apply themselves to learning on the iPad.
iPads are an interestingly impressive piece of equipment. We were issued one with my graduate class and I have been playing around with it. I have had an iPhone since they came out way back when, so I figured it was really just a big iPhone. I had no real need for it. I have a computer and my iPhone -- I felt that was enough. I am afraid that my next infusion of extra cash will find me at the shiny Apple Store buying my own "can't live without it iPad!" I am very impressed with its versatility and the multitude of applications that are out there to enhance this device.
In Kindergarten, I can see many, many ways we can use the iPad. As a tutor, I work primarily in very small groups or, ideally, one-on-one with students. The iPad would be an added benefit, providing an experience beyond flash cards and manipulatives in which I can engage the students through the various skills they need to master.
As an example, for handwriting and learning to write their names, I could use the app Ready to Print, (cost, $10.49) and for ABC recognition, I could use Alphabet Deluxe (cost, $0.99), both readily available from the app store. Students use this app to toggle through the alphabet to see pictures and words that start with the letter chosen. It is a fun activity which is great for beginners learning their alphabet.
We could also use the iPad to locate educational songs and sing-alongs that have shown success in learning numbers, skip counting and letters such as Dr. Jean and Friends songs or other various videos such as the ABC video with Tutitu (pictured above).
On a more administrative note, I am excited to have found this fabulous app called Three Ring which I would like to use as my documentation for this school year. I keep a notebook currently for each class, making anecdotal notes on each student and the achievements we make during our sessions. With this app I can store pictures of students' work, as well as video of their accomplishments. For example, when they sucessfully count to 30, or other milestones that occur throughout the year, I can take one device around all day from class to class and have at my fingertips all my information and notes, as well as a handy tool to aid in our studies.
So, the days of nap time and kitchen center may be gone. However, we welcome the days of iPads and apps and tweets. I am excited about all the new technology and the various ways in which we can begin to teach and learn with it in our classrooms!
