Strategies, Practices and Tools
Decades of research provides a clear understanding of how skilled reading develops and how to most effectively support children in learning to read proficiently. Evidence-based, structured literacy instruction develops all the foundational language and literacy skills that must be woven together so that children can make meaning from the words they read.
The information presented here is intended to complement evidence-based core reading curricula and intervention programs already in place and help educators fill in gaps or modify their approaches with effective strategies, instructional practices, and tools and activities to implement them.
Early childhood educators can focus their practices to help children build language and emergent literacy skills. Pre-K and K-3 educators can find evidence-based ways to provide explicit, implicit, and incidental instruction across the essential components of literacy. And English Language Arts teachers across grades 4-12 will find effective practices to help students meet the increasing need for skilled reading.
Instructional Strategy
Teach new words through repetition and child-friendly definitions.
Support of vocabulary growth within early care and education settings is one of the most critical ways to support a child’s early development, school readiness, and later school success.
Source: University of Virginia
Effective Practices
- Intentionally teach selected vocabulary.
- 18 to 36 months: Create a visual word wall that features pictures of some key vocabulary that you are using and teaching.
- 6 to 18 months: Identify words that are meaningful to the child and support and help build them into the child’s vocabulary.
- Birth to 6 months: Provide specific labels for objects that child is glancing, gesturing or pointing to.
- Elaborate on the labels that you provide, such as naming an object and also describing its color, shape, or size.
- Provide child-friendly definitions.
- Use a mix of familiar and new words to define and describe.
- 18 to 36 months: During the context of reading books or during activities, pause to provide a quick definition of key words.
- Repeat words often.
- Provide multiple opportunities for child to hear and experience a new word.
- Repeat a word multiple times by using it and elaborating on the word within a short story or comment.
- Prompt the child to also use the word.
- Support the child to repeat the words or phrases in extended ways.
- Model early words.
- Birth to 6 months: Repeat a sound and add a second sound, combining both to make a simple word.
Tools and Activities
Teaching New Words: Embedding Vocabulary Instruction in Storybooks
Watch this video presentation for more about explicit vocabulary instruction, teaching practices, and examples of assessment strategies to help inform instruction.
Learn More from Head Start Early Childhood Learning & Knowledge Center
Related
Developmental benchmarks and literacy behaviors that most children display at a particular age/grade.
Evidence-based reading interventions support students who are identified as struggling with specific foundational literacy skills.
Evidence-based core curricula, interventions, and supplemental programs play a critical role in supporting students’ reading success.
While seemingly effortless, good reading is made up of a set of complex skills and strategies.