Parents can do much to nurture early oral language development in their children through creative and focused quality time spent with them. Try the simple activities described in this article.
Paragraph shrinking is a strategy that makes the process of summarizing explicit. It gives students an easy-to-learn set of steps to find the main idea.
Persuasive writing is a form of writing where the writer attempts to convince or persuade the audience to adopt a particular point of view or take a specific action through the development of logical arguments and a cohesive summary. Young children can be guided through a series of simple steps in an effort to develop their persuasive writing skills.
Teaching kids to identify text structure is a really good idea. However, focusing those efforts on how the content is structured will usually be more beneficial than on the common rhetorical structures.
Like all children, your child will learn and develop, yet she will likely develop more slowly than other children her age. Reading aloud and talking about the story and the pictures will help your child improve her vocabulary and help teach grammar. Here are some other tips to help your child enjoy books and reading.
Summarizing teaches students how to identify the most important ideas in a text, how to ignore irrelevant information, and how to integrate the central ideas in a meaningful way. Teaching students to summarize improves their memory for what is read. Summarization strategies can be used in almost every content area.
This article presents a developmental framework of informational writing developed from a study of children’s writing in K-5 classrooms. See examples of children’s compositions at each developmental level, and learn how to use this continuum to support increasingly more mature forms of informational text.
Teaching students to use transition words helps them improve their writing. Transition words help stories flow more smoothly, by providing logical organization and improving the connections between thoughts.
This comprehensive study identified interventions that improved students’ performance in six language and literacy domains— language, phonological awareness, print knowledge, decoding, early writing, and general literacy.
The development of oral language is one of the child’s most natural – and impressive – accomplishments. Get an introduction to when and how language is learned.
For years, the field of reading education has been engaged in thinking about best practices. Explicit instruction in vocabulary, rereading and using digital textbooks to motivate children’s reading are among some of these updated best practices. Those in the reading community are urged to consider best practices, and how we may promote their uses, with high fidelity in classroom instruction.
Learning a second language is hard, but it can be made easier when the teacher knows a bit about the similarities between the first and second languages, and can successfully motivate students.
Understanding text structure is key to reading comprehension and also helps strengthen writing skills. In this section you’ll learn about the 5 most common text structures and how to help students learn to identify and use text structures in their reading and writing.
Research has demonstrated that the most effective read alouds are those where children are actively involved asking and answering questions and making predictions, rather than passively listening. This article describes in detail a technique for a three-step interactive read aloud using sophisticated storybooks.
In this webcast, Robin Scarcella provides an overview of academic language instruction for English language learners, as well as teaching strategies, activity ideas, and recommended resources.
Learn how technology tools can support struggling students and those with learning disabilities in acquiring background knowledge and vocabulary, improving their reading comprehension, and making connections between reading and writing.
