Where do we start?

Wolf pulled apart several different points in her chapter titled "The Beginnings of Reading Development or Not." In this blog, I am going to focus on serious wordplay, laughter, tears, and friends, and what the language of books teaches us all.

In the next few blogs, I want to explore what's in a letter's name, when should a young child begin to read, phoneme awareness and the Wise Mother Goose, the war on word poverty, the effects of ear infections on early language development, and the possible effects of bilingual environments on learning to read.

I am going to afford myself a little bit of time for each; not going into incredible detail, however. There is just so much amazingness... I don't know what to do with my bad self! 

Serious Wordplay

Wolf introduces this section first by explaining how early readers begin by feeling a connection to the text by feeling loved. She continued with this quote, "The association between hearing written language and feeling loved provide the foundation for this long process, and no cognitive scientist or education researcher could have designed a better one." This step focuses on the understanding of pictures, through their visual systems developing in the first six months of life. By eighteen months of age, the child comes to the realization that everything has a name. Wolf showcased this by being one of the biggest eureka moments that is insufficiently noted in the first two years of life. Jean Berko Gleason emphasized when a child learns the name of something new, a major cognitive change occurs. In doing so, the oral language system is developing while conceptual understanding occurs. Lastly, Wolf notes, "the more children are read to, the more they understand all the language around them, and the more developed their vocabulary becomes." Personally, I am so appreciative to have had a mom who knew the importance and surrounded me with books!

Laughter, Tears, and Friends
In this section, Wolf states the claim and the importance of laughter, tears, and friends in the overall development of child development. Reflecting back to my childhood, some of my earliest memories are surrounded around the people I love! Through reading to children early in their life, they are able to make connections to the text and the feeling of being loved. Because feeling love also ties in to feeling safe, together, these feelings bring together a child's emotional development and reading. Stories like The Frog and the Toad, the plot lines guide emotion into being well taken care of. The story models what it is like to care and help one another. Another point made by Wolf provides the overarching example that stories read to young children yields the thoughts and feelings made by them on a regular basis.

What the language of books teaches us all
When I think about the language of books, phrases like "once a upon a time" and "in a land far, far away" instantly pop in my head. In working with a child to develop their reading skills, phrases like I provided above are essential when moving from an emerging pre-reader to a notice reader. They are essential to determining the overall time and place of a story. Additionally,figurative language elements such as: allusion, alliteration, metaphor and simile create language within a story that strengths the imagery and overall story.

One question that came to my mind after reading this section determines how did we ever learn the meaning of words like: the, then, because, of, and? Wolf makes the argument of children learning to use this words as logical connectors used regularly in speech and written language. While working with Holbrook and company through the ALA protocol, this was one aspect I found particularly fascinating. After we negotiated meaning of the concept to one true meaning of the text, together, teacher and student, we compared our student-created text to that of a higher-level text. Through this process, it was the connector words English language learners find the most struggle. As we are teaching our students to navigate text, it is important to take time to show students the connections to influence the connections that make within themselves- break the words down to aid in the meaning.