Why Read to Children?

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 10000 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).