FCS Kindergarten News
November Edition by Michelle McQueen
In this edition you will find resources that you can use in your classroom. Next kindergarten meeting is Jan. 31st, 2017.
Brown Bear Brown Bear Read Aloud
How I became a Pirate
Merry Christmas! Big Hungry Bear
Kindergarten Meeting this month
Pre-K Essential Practice #1 Intentional use of literacy artifacts in dramatic play and throughout the classroom
Making a 5 Little… Puppet sticks for retell
A copy of books, finger plays such as Five Little Monkeys or Five Green and Speckled frogs with labeled puppets and artifacts from the story
#3 Small group and individual instruction, using a variety of grouping strategies, most often with flexible groups formed and instruction targeted to children’s observed and assessed needs in specific aspects of literacy development.
Making Spaceman and tile letters for word building
The teacher: includes explicit instruction, as needed, in word recognition strategies, including multi-syllabic word decoding, text structure, comprehension strategies, and writing strategies
#5 Explicit instruction in letter-sound relationships
Making tile letters for word building, snow dough Instruction in letter-sound relationships is:
Verbally precise and involving multiple channels, such as oral and visual or visual and tactile
#6 Research- and standards- aligned writing instruction
Making FOCUS sticks The teacher provides: Explicit instruction in letter formation, spelling strategies, capitalization, punctuation, sentence construction, keyboarding, and word processing.
Oral Language Components
Oral language components
Oral language, the complex system that relates sounds to meanings, is made up of three components: the phonological, semantic, and syntactic (Lindfors, 1987).
The phonological component involves the rules for combining sounds. Speakers of English, for example, know that an English word can end, but not begin, with an -ng sound. We are not aware of our knowledge of these rules, but our ability to understand and pronounce English words demonstrates that we do know a vast number of rules.
The semantic component is made up of morphemes, the smallest units of meaning that may be combined with each other to make up words(for example, paper + s are the two morphemes that make up papers), and sentences (Brown, 1973). A dictionary contains the semantic component of a language, but also what words (and meanings) are important to the speakers of the language.
The syntactic component consists of the rules that enable us to combine morphemes into sentences. As soon as a child uses two morphemes together, as in "more cracker," she is using a syntactic rule about how morphemes are combined to convey meaning.
Like the rules making up the other components, syntactic rules become increasingly complex as the child develops. From combining two morphemes, the child goes on to combine words with suffixes or inflections (-s or -ing, as in papers and eating) and eventually creates questions, statements, commands, etc. She also learns to combine two ideas into one complex sentence, as in "I'll share my crackers if you share your juice."
Of course speakers of a language constantly use these three components of language together, usually in social situations. Some language experts would add a fourth component: pragmatics, which deals with rules of language use.
Pragmatic rules are part of our communicative competence, our ability to speak appropriately in different situations, for example, in a conversational way at home and in a more formal way at a job interview. Young children need to learn the ways of speaking in the day care center or school where, for example, teachers often ask rhetorical questions. Learning pragmatic rules is as important as learning the rules of the other components of language, since people are perceived and judged based on both what they say and when they say it.