• Julia Kallmes

Listen to "Love of Learning," a New Podcast Sponsored by Monarch!

Monarch Montessori School is proud to announce that we are sponsoring a new podcast titled Love of Learning featuring our director and lead guide, Julia Kallmes, and her close friend and fellow educator Elizabeth Elcombe.

Our first season will examine how children learn to read and how we, as educators and parents, can support this endeavor. Every episode will feature research-based, practical tips to not only give your child the gift of reading but cultivate a love for learning.

Our first episode discusses Oral Language Development. Listen to it here!

Please let us know if you have any comments or questions, and tune in again in two weeks when we talk about building a child's vocabulary.

Some Highlights from the Episode:

What is Oral Language Development?

"Oral language development is the development of speaking and listening skills--vocabulary and understanding concepts as you are speaking and listening to them. While it's grouped with vocabulary, it includes so many more other aspects. It is such an important part of early literacy skills because it sets the foundation. People often miscount or don't include it because they don't realize that in order to comprehend what you're reading you have to have the background knowledge and the vocabulary to understand the words."

How Can Adults Support a Child's Oral Language Development?

Through Conversation- "I think is the easiest way to develop it is to just converse with your child. You should be having conversations about everything. It's a very natural thing to just talk to a child, and you can before they're even speaking with you. You can narrate what you're doing and narrate what they see around them. When you're walking through a grocery store, discuss the colors of the produce or even the produce itself. 'What is this? This is an orange!' I think that that kind of experience that that is more of an organic when it's happening in your daily life."

Through Read-Alouds- "Again, it is a very very natural part of a child's life is to have a story read to them. That exposure to language that's outside of their normal conversational language is so important."

Through Using Sophisticated Vocabulary- "There are very simple ways that you can enhance your conversations to build their vocabulary. You can use a word that is maybe a more advanced, a word that they don't know, and then you can say the sentence again using more simplified language." For example: This pumpkin is massive! It's huge!

Links to research cited and examples given in the episode:

ILA Second Language Learners' Vocabulary and Oral Language Development

ILA What Effective Pre-K Literacy Instruction Looks Like

Report of the National Reading Panel

Reading Rockets: Oral Language

Comic about paleontological knowledge

12 views0 comments

Recent Posts

See All