Literacy

Making conversations, Years Prep-2

Hello St Anthony’s families. I hope you are all well.

This fortnight’s article is all about how families can support younger children to continue to develop and expand their oral language.

Families can encourage younger children’s oral language development by using everyday experiences such as going for walks, playing outside, playing board games, cooking and doing arts and crafts together to create conversations. It is important for adults to intentionally pause to give children time to think about and verbalise a response.

Families can create opportunities for children to speak by using ‘I wonder’ questions such as ‘I wonder why leaves fall from trees in Autumn?’ I wonder questions encourage children’s thoughts and ideas about a topic. I wonder questions also encourage children to use technical words when discussing a concept or topic.

The following strategies can be used to expand a conversation:

• Have conversations about children’s personal experiences and interests which might involve using photographs as a prompt.
• Use active listening techniques such as making eye-contact so your child knows that you have their full attention and are ready to fully participate in the conversation.  
• Paraphrasing a child’s talk and model more complex language. For example, if a child says, ‘Look there’s a puppy’, you might respond, ‘Oh yes, I can see the poodle. It’s soft, white coat reminds me of the clouds.’

Expanding Vocabulary, Years 3-6

Knowledge of vocabulary is correlated with academic success. Students who have larger vocabularies demonstrate higher levels of reading comprehension.

Really knowing what a word means is not just about recalling a definition learned by rote. In order to be able to actually transfer our knowledge of a word to the kind of situations where we will use it, our concept of the word needs to be connected to our prior experience.

What kinds of learning experiences are likely to facilitate vocabulary development?

Wide Reading

• Through wide reading, words are introduced in a meaningful context.
• Context Clues –looking for relationships between ideas across sentences and the text as a whole.
• Developing Word Consciousness – Beyond understanding the definition of a word, students need to understand how words can transform into different parts of speech and the effect the word’s role in the sentence may have on its meaning. They also need to have an awareness of why one word may express a particular meaning better than another in a particular context.

Marina Russo

English Leader