Comments on: Literacy begins at home?

By: Talking to small children « Elbows, knees, dreams

Talking to small children « Elbows, knees, dreams — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 16:41:12 +0000

[...] felt like enough. I keep thinking about the Meaningful Differences study (which I wrote about here), and how vast the vocabulary gap is between children who grow up in poverty, and children who grow [...]

By: kiri8

kiri8 — Tue, 20 May 2008 13:09:35 +0000

It used to drive me crazy, especially when I my boys were little: “I’m doing this for my children, why can’t you do this for yours?!”

But then I would think, my mom taught me my colors by asking me questions like, “do you want to wear your blue pants or your red ones?” and I just naturally did those things with my children.

Other moms never had anyone model good parenting to them, and they really don’t know how to teach their children or get them ready for school.

By: mrsvierkant

mrsvierkant — Tue, 20 May 2008 02:36:52 +0000

I took training 2 years ago called SEEDS which is literacy training for infant/toddler/preschool child care and education. It was an amazing course, and I learned so much from it. It also affirmed that what we were doing at our preschool was the right thing. We have an organization in our town that is trying to close the achievement gap at the toddler/preschool level, and it is in the early stages yet. I hope that it really does work. It seems so simple: talk to your child, read to your child, encourage questions, ask questions. Yet it is so difficult for so many.

By: The Science Goddess

The Science Goddess — Sat, 17 May 2008 12:43:36 +0000

We just produced a DVD for our district that highlights this information. We are an all Title I district—and literacy issues are a significant challenge (to say the least).

Many parents are saying that they don’t talk to their infants/young children because the kids don’t talk back yet.

So, we’re trying to emphasize more modeling. At Parent Nights for older children, we are playing the DVD and doing other outreach so that parents who are there (and also have babies/toddlers at home) might start to make connections.

It’s definitely an uphill battle…but the kids are worth it.