1 Why Read to Children? Week 2

2 The Challenge- Between 4 and 9, a child will have to -master 100 phonics rules -___________________________________ -develop a reading speed of nearly 100 words per minute -combine words on a page with a half-dozen squiggles that create an image in his/her mind of something (Paul Kropp, 1996)

3 Why Read to Children? Regular reading to children from an early age helps children meet this challenge in a number of ways Lipps and Yiptong-Avila (1999) reported that households with two working parents earning an average of $80,000, annually, spent only four minutes per day reading to their children.

4 Why Read to Children? ____________________________________ It broadens their reading interests and helps them develop a taste for quality literature It ________________________ and their understanding of sentence patterns (more on this later)

5 Why Read to Children? It exposes children to “too good to miss” books

6 Why Read to Children? It expands a child’s range of experiences It introduces children to different concepts about written language – Types of literature (poems, plays) – Elements of story structure (plot, characters)

7 Why Read to Children? It provides a pleasurable shared experience Reading to children has a direct and measurable impact on student success

8 Reading Builds Vocabulary Normal childhood conversation consists of ______ words and increases gradually through childhood Normal conversation among adults consists of about ___________ words. Another ________ words we use less commonly in conversation

9 Reading Builds Vocabulary Beyond those words are the “rare words” and they play a critical role in reading The eventual strength of our vocabulary is determined not by the common 10,000 words but _________________________________.

10 Reading Builds Vocabular Conversation and media (TV, film, radio) is less effective than print in building rare word vocabulary Children are at risk if they

11 Reading Builds Vocabulary This gigantic word gap ____________________________________ ____________________________________ Very difficult to make up this gap once a child reaches school High quality day care for children from homes where children are not read to or engaged in significant meaningful conversation can help ______________

12 What is Reading? Reading is the process of combining What you know about a subject +What is written on the page _____________________________ =

13 Background Knowledge The more background knowledge a child has from the easier it is for him/her to learn to read

14 Discussion Question What are the two best predictors of a child’s success in school ? – The number of books in the home – The level of the mother’s education – Phonemic awareness – I.Q. – Socio-economic status – Letter recognition

15 What research says The two best predictors of early reading success are _________________ and _____________________. (M.J. Adams, 2002)

16 Letter (alphabetic) recognition Knowing the 26 letters of the alphabet by sound and name (some experts say name of letter isn’t as important at first) Being able to recognize the upper and lower case of each letter Knowing the alphabet in order

17 Phonemic Awareness ____________________________________ ____________________________________ Being able to associate the sounds with words that have the letter in them. I spy with my little eye something that begins with /d/ (door, doll, desk, donut)

18 Letter recognition and phonemic awareness are the two top predictors of success in grade 1 Also important is understanding the ________________________________ – Letters represent sounds – Words are made of letters – Sentences are made of words

19 We start at the front of the book We start at the top of the page and go to the bottom We read left to right

20 Reading to Children The most effective way to develop these skills in pre-school children is to read to them often. Reading to children is much more effective than trying to teach these skills through formal lessons before they go to school.

21 Ministry of Education The Ministry expectations state: Most students entering Junior Kindergarten will ________________________________. Students will have more difficulty naming (recalling) all of the letters. By the end of SK, all students should be able to _________________________________.

22 Ministry expectations The expectation of the Ministry of Education is that by the time students enter grade 1, all students should be able to ______________________________. By the end of grade 1, most students should be able to recall most of the letter sounds and _________________________________

23 Reviewing the terms ______________________ are the smallest part of sound in a spoken word that make a difference in the word’s meaning. /h/at /m/at. ____________________________ is the understanding that the sounds of spoken language work together to make words. _________________ is the understanding that there is a predictable relationship between phonemes and graphemes ( written letters).