Child will develop the ability to speak and/ or sign in increasingly complete, complex, precise, and varied ways.
What educators might observe
-
Expresses an opinion or point of view on a story, referring to relevant examples or details
-
Summarizes a text in a retelling
-
Uses a wide range of vocabulary specific to academic subjects to explain what they learned in school
-
Uses their knowledge of home language to find cognates in English
Ways educators might support the child's development
-
Choose a sentence that has a complex structure
-
Engage in word play by altering the vocabulary in the sentence
-
Chart sentence and unpack meaning
-
Use sentence starters to practice making new sentences with a similar structure
-
Research the bases and parts of words with children; look for and point out meaning in the structure of words
Child will develop their ability to listen and understand complete, complex, precise, and varied language.
What educators might observe
-
Listens to peers and attends to conversational turns in a small group
-
Attends during a presentation by a guest speaker who shares about a topic for a sustained period
-
Shows refined understanding of social contexts and uses gestures or nonverbal behavior to respond to situations
Ways educators might support the child's development
-
Model strategies for self-monitoring, understanding, and using questions to clarify
-
Ask peers to elaborate or role play the ways in which partners can request more information to increase understanding
-
Structure activities that include speaking with partners and using specific words or parts of speech; for example, interviewing about something in the past that requires understanding of verbs in past tense
-
Use think-aloud or sentence starters to model the thinking process and encourage understanding of one’s own or a character’s feelings, changes, motivations, and inner thoughts
Child uses language to relate to others according to the social expectations of their family, community, and culture.
What educators might observe
-
Takes the perspective of another person in a group into account and modifies their language use or actions as needed
-
Converses on a topic, maintaining attention to what the other person understands and sharing their own understanding
-
Uses language to persuade and argue opinions and to understand and respond to another’s point of view
Ways educators might support the child's development
-
Establish norms for social communication in the learning environment
-
Teach children to identify micro-aggressions: brief hostile, negative prejudicial slights and insults toward any group
-
Ask children to write from the perspective of someone from a different time or place
-
Invite children to develop and share a point of view on a topic of interest
Child enjoys, attends to, understands, and makes meanings from spoken and written language of storytelling and books.
What educators might observe
-
Reads all the books in a series
-
Slows down when the text becomes more difficult to read
-
Makes an argument with relevant details during a book discussion (e.g., uses information learned from watching a National Geographic television program to add to a discussion of a book)
-
Reads a letter from a friend and responds to social questions
-
Identifies an author’s purpose (e.g., “I think the author wanted to teach people not to be afraid to try new things. I’m going to go to try to do the monkey bars.”)
-
Consults other books, maps, websites, hyperlinks, and photographs to enhance their reading
Ways educators might support the child's development
-
Give children time to respond to texts in a variety of ways
-
Assign parts to act out a book or story
-
Encourage children to collaborate, improvise, and use props to perform the story
-
Establish centers where children can make art or explore science materials in response to books or stories on a theme or topic
Child develops the ability to recognize and manipulate the different sounds in spoken language(s).
What educators might observe
-
Asks about rhymes in languages other than their own (e.g., “What rhymes with Estrella?”)
-
Repeats sophisticated tongue twisters, such as “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,”
Ways educators might support the child's development
-
Invite children to compose a song for a friend by changing the lyrics of a favorite song to personalize it
-
Play a familiar card game, and replace cards with images and words that match; for example, children can play “Go Fish” and ask for a word that rhymes with the card they have
-
Invite students to create their own rhyming poems, songs, or haikus
Child uses materials and/ or language to make meaning for themselves and/or an audience.
What educators might observe
-
Composes a letter to a friend that uses their home language variation
-
Makes a case in a debate by stating an argument, investigates information, and includes reasons with relevant supporting details in writing
-
Writes a version of a fairy tale with a character using a particular voice
-
Seeks to master mature styles of composition (e.g., draws scenes for a comic book or graphic novel)
-
Uses resources to enhance their compositions (e.g., uses a thesaurus to find a word with a particular nuance to express an emotion or idea)
Ways educators might support the child's development
-
Welcome and celebrate the variety of children’s composing processes
-
Discuss what makes an argument effective and how to find an equally effective counterargument
-
Provide models of approaches to composition; discuss and chart an author’s intent or purpose across various types of texts in an author’s body of work (e.g., discuss the purpose of Patricia Polacco’s Chicken Sunday , Thank You, Mr. Falker , and Pink and Say )
Child views, creates, and makes meaning of visual communication and multimedia documentation, which includes drawings, collections, photographs, videos and displays.
What educators might observe
-
Identifies visual communication that is misleading
-
Takes into consideration the aesthetic aspects of images, audio, and video related to their social and cultural meanings for an intended audience
Ways educators might support the child's development
-
Invite a video editor to visit the class and ask them to explain the process of experimenting and editing with different tools to modify size, color, and shape for intended message
-
Provide tools for children to make their own videos
-
Support use of critical media literacy by provocations to discuss credibility and evidence
-
Teach children to identify bias in media