From Babbling to Books: Building Pre-Reading Skills

Featuring Todd R. Risley, Sharon Landesman Ramey, and Julie Washington discussing research-based strategies for developing language and pre-reading skills in young children.

Our professional development webcast series (Links to an external site.)

Program description

Young children who perform better than their peers in reading do so for several reasons, but one of the most overlooked is this – lots of family talk. Far too many young children come to school with poor oral language skills because they just don’t know enough words. The good news is that helping a young child is simple. By engaging kids in rich stories and having meaningful conversations with them, you – as a parent or a daycare provider or a preschool teacher – can help improve their oral language skills, which will eventually help them become better readers.

This 60-minute webcast stresses the importance of working with young children early to develop language and pre-reading skills. It will provide adults who work with young children with research-based strategies that can help lay the foundation for building strong readers. This webcast is sponsored in part by Scholastic, the global children’s publishing, education and media company.

From Babbling to Books: Building Pre-Reading Skills is available for purchase at our online store, LearningStore (Links to an external site.).

Presenters

Todd R. Risley is professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Alaska and former professor of human development and senior scientist of the Bureau of Child Research at the University of Kansas. He is the co-author of Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children and Learning to Talk.

Sharon Landesman Ramey is the director of the Center for Health and Education at Georgetown University. Drs. Sharon and Craig Ramey are widely considered to have done the most extensive work to date on what permanently enhances development in young children. Their numerous studies have shown dramatic gains in learning and accomplishment as the result of nurturing care in early childhood.

Julie Washington is a professor in the department of audiology and speech language pathology at Wayne State University. Her research focus is language development and language disorders in African American children at the time of school entry and emergent literacy skills of high-risk preschoolers.

After carefully observing the webcast please respond to each question displaying a “thick understanding” of what you learned.

www.readingrockets.org (Links to an external site.)

After observing the video respond to each of the following questions, showing a gain of knowledge in speech, language, and the reading process.

1. What does Dr. Risley say about how language is developed in babies and young

children?

1. What does Dr. Washington discuss and share about how language is developed in young children?
2. How does a child begin to assign meanings to words?
3. “Reading is not necessarily the point of a book “—-for babies and/or very young children. What is explained as to what parents can do in order to interact with the child/baby and a book.
4. In the classroom video clip how do teachers use books to stimulate children’s’ language development?
5. Explain what you learned from the video clip of Dr. Washington at work at the University of Michigan.
6. What is the connection between speaking and reading?
7. Why should we pay attention to “late talkers?”
8. What does Dr. Washington say that speech-language pathologists can do to help students with the reading process?