One Storybook at a Time

Building Preschool Children’s Language and Literacy One Storybook at a Time

Katherine A. Beauchat, Katrin L. Blamey, Sharon Walpole
 

The article discusses about Innovation Configuration a tool that was developed to assist teachers in planning their shared storybook readings with students. It consist of five sections: 1)Oral Language Development 2)Comprehension Development 3)Vocabulary Instruction 4)Phonological Awareness 5)Print Awareness

            Shared storybook reading include all instances when an adult reads to a child or children, pausing to engage children in discussion about the text (Holdaway, 1979). During my shared storybook reading in my classroom I’m always pausing in between the story and asking the children questions about the text am reading or to tell my about the pictures on the page.

Based on Oral Language Development the article discuss that during shared storybook reading, teachers develop children’s language when they engage the child before, during, or after the reading.   Teachers can also ask open-ended questions that allow for multiple responses and connections to story content (e.g., Neuman, Copple, & Bredekamp, 2000) and seize opportunities to repeat children’s responses by building upon them with additional rich language (e.g., Whitehurst, Arnold, et al., 1994; Whitehurst et al., 1988).  Another way teachers can extend oral language is by using a follow up questions when child responds with one or two word answer. 

            The second Innovation Configuration tool is comprehension development.  Comprehension development includes a range of thinking tasks.  Whitehurst, Epstein, et al. (1994) suggested CROWD as an acronym for that range. 

Completion question- ask children to fill in a one-word answer to a question taken directly from the text

Recall questions- ask children to remember a sequence of events from the text in order. 

Open-ended questions- have no right or wrong answer but instead ask children to make comments or predictions
 

Wh-prompts- use the traditional who, what, when, where question starters and normally require only one- or two-word answers.

 

Distancing questions- ask children to make connections between their lives and the text.

Teachers can engage students in vocabulary instruction directly before or after the shared reading event. The teacher might introduce a specific word using picture cards or props and then prompt students to discuss their understandings (Wasik & Bond, 2001). After introducing the word, the teacher can guide the children to say the word to establish a phonological representation (Beck, McKeown, & Kucan, 2002). This procedure helps children to root that word in memory.  How is done in my classroom I will give the children words of the story during morning message and ask them about the word.  Then later on that week read them the story. Ask them if they remember seeing or knowing the meaning of the word that I introduced during the week.  Also based on the article teachers can give the children a child friendly definition for example the word goggles the teachers used to describe it the word (glasses).

Another development of IC is the phonological awareness section. Phonological awareness is the ability to attend to the sound structure of spoken language. Research indicates a sequence of phonological awareness skills from easiest, which is segmenting and blending the parts of compound words. To hardest, which segmenting and blending the individual phonemes in words. However, research also stresses the importance of developing children’s skills in these areas simultaneously (Lonigan, 2008). The article also mention that preschoolers who are given training in phonological awareness have accelerated reading acquisition (Adams, 1990) but we target only the simplest tasks. Those tasks are rhyme, syllables and initial sounds.  When I’m reading a book I ask the children if they can hear any rhyming words in the story and I also ask them to clap how many words are in the title of the book.  This could be practice every time a story is read in the classroom.

Finally print awareness is introducing forms, features, and functions of prints in a book.  Teachers introduces the way to start reading by going from left to right of the page. The article gave an interesting break down on how to introduce print awareness in the classroom. Starting with Mondays for being explicit about how to hold a book and identifying the front cover and title page, Tuesdays for discussing the role of author and illustrator, Wednesdays for counting the number of words in the title and locating where to begin reading, Thursdays for demonstrating return sweep, and Fridays for counting the words in a sentence and letters in words.  By following this schedule the teacher are able to focus on each convention.