Critical Instructional Components For Helping Students Learn

For my field experience, I had the opportunity to observe a four-year-old pre-kindergarten classroom on November 5th and 12th at Bushwick United Head Start program. The school is located at 136 Stanhope street, Brooklyn, N.Y. Majority of the families the school serve are Hispanics, and as a result, the student body entails mostly ELL students. There are approximately 130 students enrolled in the program, and out of that 130, about 10% speaks English. The school uses an additive model of English Language to support both the student’s home language and foster and support English language acquisition. The classrooms are staffed with teachers who speak the children’s home language, who can apply some use of the home-language within the classroom and providing hands-on experiences for students. Additionally, to support students with disability, the school also partnered with United Community Services (UCS), a program that offers speech therapy, occupational therapy and physical therapy to students. The school uses the evidence-based Creative Curriculum. The Creative Curriculum is aligned with Head Start Performance Standards, NAEYC guidelines and the NY State Prekindergarten Common Core Standards.

Early childhood education is crucial for success in the formalized education system. Many children born into lower income communities do not obtain this advantage. According to Kozol, simply based off accident of birth a child will lead completely different educational lives (2005). For example, a white toddler in an upper middle class neighborhood might attend a prestigious educational preliminary kindergarten. These respected early education schools are often referred to as “baby ivies” (Kozol, 2005). The child participates in pre-numeracy skills along with pre-writing skills. Conversely, a child of minority descent living in an underprivileged neighborhood may not initiate school until they are five years old. In the three previous years a

The purpose of African Americans and Boys: Understanding the Literacy Gap, Tracing Academic Trajectories, and Evaluating the Role of Learning-Related Skills is to explain which factors contribute to the literacy gap of African Americans, but primarily African American boys, in early childhood education. The study highlights that previous research identifies the presence of an achievement gap and makes associations with socioeconomic status (SES), lack of motivation, discrimination, and misbehavior as influences to the gap (Cortina, Kizzie, Matthews, & Rowley, 2010). However, in this study, the researchers attempt to explain why the gap exists, arguing that learning-related skills (LRS) best explain the literacy gap, more so than problem behaviors, socioeconomic status, and home literacy environment (Cortina et al., 2010).

The achievement gap is difficult for children just entering school because the bar has already been set to where some of those children are going to land. At the age of three, children of people with careers have vocabularies that are nearly 1.5 times greater than those of working class children, and nearly double the children whose families are on welfare.” This statistic shows that even children at the age of three experience the achievement gap because of their own home life. It is imperative to reduce or eliminate the Achievement Gap in the U.S. To do this we must identify the problem, balance and control the funding, increase our teachers’ abilities and explain the benefits of closing the gap permanently.

This test evaluates a child’s problem solving, fine motor, and vocabulary. They also scored well in the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, a measure of receptive vocabulary, where Early Head Start children scored 83.3 compared to the 81.1 score of the control group. Although a mild difference, Early Head Start students were much less likely to score in the at-risk range of developmental functioning.

As a whole, Black Americans are behind in comparison White population in terms of education. In elementary school, Black children have been found to be behind their white peers in regards to language acquisition and reading abilities. This has been attributed to the percentage of children who are being read to at home prior to entering into school. While 89% of White children were being read to prior to entering school, only 71% of Black children were (Hoffman, Llagas & Snyder, 2003, p. 37). Being read to as well as learning how to read at the levels of their peers has a positive correlation with school outcomes later in life. This leads to an increased likelihood of a Black child being held back due to skills that are not up to the same standard

Building vocabulary is an important task in the early grades. There has long been debate on how one should go about teaching vocabulary such as, it is better to teach a limited number of words fully and more intense or expose children to many words to enhance “incidental learning”. Research has proven that incorporating both into instruction is most effective. Read-aloud and teachers increase use of vocabulary have also been proven to help vocabulary and word knowledge. There are three tiers of words that children are presented in their life. Tier one words are those that they are most familiar with such as park, tier 2 are the increasingly hard words such as fortunate and finally the tier 3 words are words that students have rarely been exposed

The achievement gap is difficult for children just entering school because the bar has already been set to where some of those children are going to land. At the age of three, children of people with careers have vocabularies that are nearly 1.5 times greater than those of working class children, and nearly double the children whose families are on welfare.” This statistic shows that even children at the age of three experience the achievement gap because of their own home life. It is imperative to reduce or eliminate the Achievement Gap in the U.S. To do this we must identify the problem, balance and control the funding, increase our teachers’ abilities and explain the benefits of closing the gap permanently.

Why poor children are more likely to become poor readers: the early years by Jennifer Buckingham*, Robyn Beaman and Kevin Wheldall. In this literature, they discuss low socio-economic disadvantage and poor early literacy. “Children from disadvantaged families are less likely to have experiences that encourage the development of fundamental skills for reading acquisition, specifically phonological awareness, vocabulary and oral language.” “The relationship between socio-economic disadvantage and poor reading ability is one of the most enduring problems in education. Socio-economic disadvantage is a relative concept referring to low socio-economic status, which is usually defined by income, occupation, education, or any combination of these. (Beaman, Buckingham, and Wheldall 428). This analytical proves and evaluates elements in this journal such as its claim, empirical data and its mention of opposing sides to state its effectiveness in relaying the message.

“Literacy learning has a profound and lasting effect on the social and academic lives of children. Their future educational opportunities and career choices are directly related to literacy ability. Since early childhood is the period when language develops most rapidly, it is imperative that young children are provided with a variety of developmentally appropriate literacy experiences throughout each day, and that the classroom environment is rich with language, both spoken and printed. Early childhood teachers are responsible for both understanding the developmental continuum of language and literacy and for supporting each child’s literacy development.

In the New York Times article from 2013 titled Public Policy, Made to Fit People, Richard H. Thaler addresses the issues surrounding education and the vocabulary gap between children of middle-class and above families, versus that of poor families. In this article, Thaler claims that at the early age of three years old, children who come from middle class families have roughly double the vocabulary span of their poor counterparts.

Through this week learning resources, I have learned that there are evidences that demonstrate that when a child has limited experiences he or she is more likely to have difficult comprehending what is read. It is why early childhood professionals affirm that oral language is the foundation for literacy development. Everything that children learn about speaking and listening they use for writing and reading and what they learn from writing and reading they use in listening and speaking. In other words, oral language and literacy develop simultaneously. When parents provide rich language and literacy reinforcement at home, children do better in school than those who do not. It is also known for early childhood professionals that for a child with limited experiences is more difficult comprehending what is read. For example, a child who has being exposed to many environments like a farm or like a museum will have more mentally engagement in classrooms activities about things he or she already know that children who have not had experience in those environments. Many researches showed that children that have not have a literacy development or an oral language development years before formal schooling, are less likely to be successful beginning readers, opening an achievement lag that might last through the primary grades. Some of the reasons why parents are not actively involved into their children’s educations are their socioeconomic or legal status. For example, in an immigrant family sometimes both parents have to work and sometimes they have to work two shifts. I have known families where children are the whole day in school and with nannies. Those children do not develop any skills that help them to succeed at the time of attending forming school.

Children who grow up in poverty sometimes have more trouble with literacy and can detect it early. “Differences in literacy and cognitive skills between children in low-income families and their better-off counterparts are already apparent by age three, or perhaps even earlier” (Brooks pg. 4). This may cause problems for the child in the long run, such as also living in poverty when the become an adult.

When every child has the chance to meet his or her full potential, families, communities, and the economic future of the United States is reinforced. Surprisingly, one in four children in the United States living in low-income households enters kindergarten not equipped to learn and, as a result, fall behind from the start. “Children 's academic and social competencies at kindergarten entry are important predictors of success throughout school; children who enter school not ready to learn struggle with academic difficulties and [can] manifest social and behavior problems in later school years” (Duncan et al., 2007; Ladd, 2006). “When a young child enters kindergarten ready for school, there is an 82 percent chance that child will

When data from students who had average accuracy and fluency scores, but lower comprehension scores were compared to data from those with similar accuracy and fluency but average comprehension, the consistent differences were found to be lower oral language and vocabulary skills in the poor comprehenders upon entry into formal schooling. (Nation, Cocksey, Taylor & Bishop) Thousands of dollars each year are spent on intervention, trying to improve the reading of children that show delays. When one reads, the clear goal is comprehension of what is read. Without communication of ideas between the author and reader, decoding texts is pointless. Most intervention programs are focused on phonics and word decoding. Oral language interventions concurrent with vocabulary and comprehension tasks at age eight have been shown to lead to significant improvements in reading comprehension. (Nation, et al., 2010). Reading comprehension is not merely a product of being able to decode words and sentences. How we teach children to process and integrate the ideas found in text can have a large impact on their ability to function in a world of ever expanding knowledge and information.