[ Music ] >> Hello.
My name is Jose Maria Díaz-Lage, and I'm a member of the teaching team
for the module Didáctica de la Comunicación Escrita en Inglés.
In these two videos, I'm going to be
addressing the contents of unit number two.
So we'll be talking about the teaching and learning of literacy skills.
One important thing to remember is what Casbergue
and Strickland point out in the extract here.
That's extremely important, and we're going to
be looking at this far beyond our
engagement with the second unit in the book.
There are three important aspects in
a classroom environment for our topic.
Print exposure, literacy materials, and adult-child interactions.
As per print exposure, bear in mind that functional print, that is,
that print which is intended to serve
a purpose, name tags in the classroom,
for instance, can be very helpful.
Shelves that bear the name of the material
that should be placed there can be useful, too,
for a classroom, and all of this can be combined
with flashcards, with specific vocabulary,
and this can be not only printed on paper, but also digital.
As to literacy materials, these should be
placed in different areas of the classroom,
depending on the theme or the topic that they address.
They should be placed, obviously, at the
children's eye level, not at our eye level.
Things like alphabet puzzles, magnetic letters,
etcetera are the most frequent resources we find here.
And thirdly, we have adult-child interactions, and this is essential,
even if it seems a bit obvious, because
children imitate, children mimic.
So it's the adult's role to take
advantage of the child's natural tendency
to imitate adult behavior, so we can
simply model what we want them to emulate.
Bear in mind also that there is no
single distribution in these activities
that we're going to be talking about.
Some of them will be whole group activities, and
that's going to be quite typical in preschool.
Some of them will be small group activities, and
yet some of them will be individual activities,
and the type of activity that we engage with
is going to dictate to which type it belongs.
Now, crucially, there should be a communication
between the classroom and the home,
and this is easier to say than it is to do.
Of course, teachers must guide parents on how
they can foster the child's literacy
at home, but the contrary is also true.
The parents should be able to provide, for instance,
examples of the child's scribbles in PTA meetings,
and that can be very useful to a teacher.
This is particularly relevant in our topic, because
the average home, any home, is filled with print.
From notepads for shopping lists, to logos in commercial products,
to anything you can think of, really,
calendars, for instance: those are all sources of print information,
and we take them for granted, but they
contain a lot of useful information.
These are authentic materials.
They are already there.
They don't need to be bought.
No specific training is required, so it can be quite interesting,
but the exchange between the home and the
classroom is not without difficulties.
There might be different cultures in the homes of our students.
There might be different languages spoken there.
There might be different family situations, of course.
There might be different levels of education
and literacy in the parents themselves,
and there might be a resistance on the part
of the parents, who may have their own ideas
on how to teach literacy to their child.
Now, as we will see in the second part
of this video, the name of a child,
such obvious information as knowing how to recognize your own name,
offers a wealth of information, and we're
going to be talking about this later on.
Let me move on to what's unit four on Casbergue and Strickland's book,
and we're going to be talking about concepts of print.
Basically, concepts of print means exactly what it suggests,
the knowledge of the functions of print and how print language works,
and this includes essential components,
things that, again, we take for granted,
but which children, especially preschool children, don't know.
The structure of books, the association between print and meaning,
I'm going to return to this in the second
part of the video, because it's essential.
The directionality of print, the
concept of word, the concept of letter,
and the essential realization that print
is a representation of oral language.
There are two main strategies that we can use
in the classroom to develop those components,
and those will be shared reading and name games.
So, just very quickly, let me start with shared reading.
There are three possible activities.
There are many more, but these are the
ones that I think are most significant.
Matching sentences, matching words, and
matching letters, and these follow a progress.
Matching sentences is going to be probably easier for the children,
whereas matching letters is going to be the most difficult one.
When you match a sentence, the teacher will show
children a sentence in a book, for instance,
and they have to match it to the one that they have on their cards.
So, it's basically very basic material.
On matching words, the teacher will cut
up the individual words of a sentence,
so they will have individual bits of paper with
single words, and using the book as an example,
the students will have to order the sentence.
They're going to be working on their
recognition of what a word actually is.
And on matching letters, as you may guess, we
choose words, for instance, that are a bit similar,
words which start with the same letter, for
instance, and students must find them in the book.
As to name games, name games, as the name suggests,
are based on games or activities that focus on the
children's names, and there's a reason for this.
And that's the fact that for children, their
own names are usually a source of interest, and a source of curiosity.
Their names attract their attention.
Very often, more often than not, children are very
interested in learning how to write and spell their names.
So this, again, is supposed to progress from easier to more difficult.
Things like name match.
This involves that each child has a label with
his or her own name, and the teacher shows one,
it might be any pupil in the classroom, and asks "whose name is this?",
and the children must recognize the
identity between their own name on the card,
the one they have, and the one the teacher is showing.
So this is very basic.
As to name puzzle, each child is given an envelope,
and on the envelope is written their name.
Inside the envelope, what we have are the
name's constituent letters cut up individually.
So basically what the child has to do is
take the name on the envelope as an example,
and sort out the individual letters of his or her own name.
As to letter detectives, this is a very simple
activity, but it can be made as difficult as we like.
Children must find, for instance, two
names starting with the same letter.
That would be the most basic version, but it
can also be two names with the same last letter,
or two names containing the same letter anywhere.
We can introduce variation, and ideally
we would move from the easiest one,
the one with the initial, to the most difficult one,
which is the one where the letter can be placed anywhere in the name.
Again, a connection between the
classroom and the home is essential here.
But things that we take for granted, like
a parent singing the alphabet to the child,
can be a very valid way of bringing the classroom into the home.
The same as displaying the child's name in a visible place in the home.
That's also quite useful.
Or providing the child, as I said a
few minutes ago, with magnetic letters
for him or her to be able to play around with.
So as I said, this video has focused on Units
2 and 4 of Casbergue and Strickland's book.
And on the next video, I'll be talking about
Chapter 5 and about a separate article, too.
Thank you for watching, and see you for the second part of the video.
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