Early Literacy Matters OWL 101

1. Early Literacy MattersOWL 101 Jennifer Kearns-Fox, Mary Lu Love, Lisa Van Thiel Institute for Community Inclusion University of Massachusetts Boston

2. Early Literacy Matters Take a minute to write down any questions you have about Early Literacy Matters or OWL (Opening the World of Learning). Post on the question board. After lunch we will respond to all of the questions.

3. Early Literacy Matters Goals • Enhance language and literacy instruction • Enhance classroom environments • Support implementation practices through coaching • Foster family literacy • Enhance knowledge and skills: • Scientifically-Based Reading Research

4. Student & Environmental Outcomes • Student growth in literacy skills: • Phonological awareness • Alphabet knowledge • Concepts of print • Student writing • Student oral language development: • Expressive • Receptive • Instructional environment: • Literacy matters • Literacy usage Professional Development High-quality teacher training Weekly in-class literacy coaching System for continuous monitoring of implementation fidelity System for continuous evaluation of outcomes to identify areas for teacher improvement Instruction Implementation Instructionally sound delivery model Focus on critical literacy and oral language components Evidence based Appropriate for preschool population Maintain students’ interest and relevance

5. Our Changing Understanding Reading Readiness theory: • Children need a certain “maturity” to learn to read. • Read first, then learn to write. Emergent Literacy theory: • Children learn skills over time; reading is an accumulation of multiple skills. • Learning to write informs learning to read, and vice versa.

6. Key OWL Components Songs, Word Play & Letters; Phonological Awareness Multiple Shared Readings Small Groups, Progress Monitoring Let’s Find Out About It; Let’s Talk About It Center Time, Conversations with Children Writing Across the Curriculum

7. Agenda • Multiple Shared Readings • Small Group • Progress monitoring • Songs, Word & Letter Play - Phonemic Awareness • Writing Across the Curriculum • Let’s Find Out About It

8. Benefits of Shared Reading New vocabulary Concepts of print Letter/sound correspondence Story reconstruction

9. Interactive and/or Dialogic Reading • Children talk with the teacher about pictures and story. • Teacher systematically scaffolds adult-child language interactions around storybook reading. • Teacher engages children before, during, and after reading text through explicit interactive techniques.

10. Shared reading provides opportunities to observe: What the child can learn to do independently Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) What the child can do with support What the child can do independently now

11. Why intervene • Of 50 children having trouble learning to read in kindergarten, 44 of them will still be having trouble in third grade.

12. Preparing for Reading Aloud • Choose quality books • Read the book yourself first • Identify new vocabulary

13. What did we forget to do….

14. Dialogic Reading • Take turns in a conversation about the story. • Encourage children to become the storytellers over time. • Engage small group of children in repeating, restating, and expanding language around a story.

15. First Reading Enjoying the story • Overall sense of the book • Supply information about meanings of words • Interpretation of key events • Informally assess children’s prior knowledge

16. Second Reading Engaging the child in the story • Work with children to reconstruct the story • Revisit vocabulary words • Point to pictures, use voice or gestures to engage students • Connect story to children’s personal lives

17. Third Reading Guided reconstruction of story • Chime in • Repeat key phrases • Respond to “What happens next?” • Define key vocabulary • Make connections between parts of story • Look for specifics: • Rhyming words • Words that start with specific letters

18. Fourth Reading Engage children in retelling story • Role play • Flannel board • Movement • Using new vocabulary words

19. OWL Curriculum Guides • Purpose • Strategies for reading each story • Key vocabulary • Progress monitoring • Suggestions • English language learners • Extending the book

20. Active Engagement

21. Break

22. Define Small Group

23. OWL Small Group • Regularly scheduled component of the day • 4-6 children work with a teacher • Intentionally planned activity and progress monitoring

24. What makes Small Group successful? • Preparation of materials • Efficient transitions to and from Small Group • Timing that fits instructional goals • Clearly defined roles for teachers, teaching partners, and children

25. Working in Small Groups • Divide into 4 small groups of 3-4 people per group. • Each group will be given a problem to solve in the next 10 minutes. • Each group will be asked to report out their answer.

26. Label Correctly • You have three boxes of fruit. One contains just apples, one contains just oranges, and one contains a mixture of both. Each box is labeled -- one says "apples," one says "oranges," and one says "apples and oranges." However, it is known that none of the boxes are labeled correctly. How can you label the boxes correctly if you are only allowed to take and look at just one piece of fruit from just one of the boxes?

27. Family Reunion • At a family reunion were the following people: one grandfather, one grandmother, two fathers, two mothers, four children, three grandchildren, one brother, two sisters, two sons, two daughters, one father-in-law, one mother-in-law, and one daughter-in-law. But not as many people attended as it sounds. How many were there, and who were they?

28. Three men at a hotel • Three men stay at a hotel for the night. The innkeeper charges thirty dollars per room per night. The men rent one room; each pays ten dollars. The bellhop leads the men to their room. Later, the innkeeper discovers he has overcharged the men and asks the bellhop to return five dollars to them. On the way upstairs, the bellhop realizes that five dollars can't be evenly split among three men, so he decides to keep two dollars for himself and return one dollar to each man. At this point, the men have paid nine dollars each, totaling 27. The bellhop has two, which adds up to 29. Where did the thirtieth dollar go?

29. How many “F”s? FINISHED FILES ARE THE RE- SULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIF-IC STUDY COMBINED WITHTHE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS

30. What Does Research Tell Us? Cooperation in small groups promotes achievement and productivity and yields strong social and attitudinal benefits. - Yager, Johnson and Johnson (1985)

31. Small Group • Increases oral interactions between and among students • Fosters child-to-child interactions • Increases the number of interactive dialogues between adults and children • Results in improved comprehension

32. Small Group literacy activities might include… • Pre-reading or sharing books to model reading behaviors • Talking about letters by name and sound • Modeling the use of print in the environment • Modeling writing (recording dictations) • Engaging playing with sounds and words • Introducing literacy-related play activities and games to occur in center time • Supporting and scaffolding responses to children’s representation and writing

33. Small Groups Provide Opportunities for Observing and Documenting: • What children know • What children can do • What children can do with support • Children’s strengths • Children’s learning preferences

34. Observing and Documenting • Watch the video clip • List the language and literacy skills observed • Be prepared to participate in whole-group discussion

35. Progress Monitoring Using ongoing assessment information to guide instructional decisions is a primary purpose of early childhood assessment and should be a component of a high-quality early childhood program. - NAEYC & NAECS/SDE (2003)

36. Break

37. Sound Chain • Stand up and form a line • First person turns and says a word to person behind her • Second person hears word and turns to person behind and says a rhyming word • Have fun! • Now let try alliteration; then, last sound becomes first sound of next word!

38. Phonemic Awareness is… …the understanding that oral language can be broken up into individual words, words into syllables, and syllables into individual sounds, or phonemes. Skills include rhyme, syllable-awareness, and phonemic awareness. - Bradley & Bryant, 1983; Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998 p p o

39. Visual representation of phonemic awareness

40. Reading Listening Letters Phonics Phonemic Awareness Phonological Awareness

41. What does research tell us?

42. Phonemic Awareness • Supports learning how words are represented in print. • Allows children to notice the number and/or order of sounds in words. • Requires understanding how to use phonemic cues in identifying printed words. Without it, children cannot understand the strategy of “sounding out” words.

43. Phonemic Awareness is Important • Children who are better at detecting and manipulating syllables, rhymes, or phonemes learn to read faster than children who cannot complete these tasks. • The lack of phonemic awareness is the most powerful determinant of the likelihood of failure to read. • Phonemic awareness is the most potent predictor of success in learning to read - more highly related to reading than tests of general intelligence, reading readiness, and listening comprehension.

44. Cracking the Code Children with poor phonological processing skills: • have difficulty “cracking” the alphabetic code. • tend to rely on contextual cues to guess the unfamiliar word rather than knowledge of phonics to decode it. abc d

46. Strategies to Promote Phonological Awareness • Choose books to read aloud that focus on sounds: rhyming and alliteration. • Invite children to make up new verses of familiar words or songs by changing the beginning sounds of words. • Play games where children isolate the beginning sound in familiar words or generate rhyming words.

47. Build a Rhyme Awareness Repertoire • Read rhyming stories and poems • Guess what rhymes with…. • Fill in the missing rhyme • Substitute new rhymes for old • Generate name-and-word pairs Adapted from Gillon, 2004, Hohmann, 2002

48. Bingo Board

49. Build an Alliteration Repertoire • Use the term “alliteration” • Use alliterative phrases in everyday conversation • Identify alliteration in books, poems, tongue twisters, songs • Fill in missing alliterations • Substitute new alliterations for old • Make up name-based alliterations • Alliterative “I Spy” Adapted from Hohmann, 2002

50. Play with Words • Record children’s examples of rhyming, alliteration, or nonsense sequences in a class-made big book, and read them aloud over and over! licking lions lovely lie longingly lazy