I want to start this blog by celebrating the word 'Ako'. Unlike the word 'teach' in English (implying one-way traffic from the teacher to the learner), 'ako' contains the concepts of both teaching and learning. This beautifully conveys how we experience life as kaiako: we hope to pass on a little learning, but daily find ourselves learning just as much in return from our students! Added to this, ongoing study to keep our skills sharp is part of the mix.
Right now, the Junior team is doing some literacy study with the University of Canterbury. We will definitely be sharing lots more on this with you - and soon. But for now, I thought I'd share one small nugget of learning that spoke to me as a parent, as well as a teacher.
Oral narrative skills: the ability to tell or retell fictional stories
Kaiako are always keen to encourage whānau to share books together. We also know that a rich, oral language environment at home (lots of talk with lots of different words - in any language or languages) helps children when they start school. Our recent studies have focussed especially on the skill of oral storytelling (oral narrative skills).
Our children's oral narrative skills are important in the early years of school. They help children to take part in classroom life and connect with subjects from across the curriculum. Our students bring a lot of knowledge with them to school. They learn best when they can connect new ideas with what they already know. Sharing knowledge and experiences is part of this. For children, sharing often in the form of a simple story. Sound oral language skills enable children to share ideas with others and to build on what they already know.
Research now also shows us that a child's ability to retell a story is a predictor of their success at school, particularly at reading comprehension. Reading comprehension means being able to understand fully what a text means. It is possible to decode and 'read' a story without really understanding it. The Simple View of Reading suggests that good readers combine efficient decoding (identifying the sounds in a word and blending them together) with comprehension skills to make sense of what they are reading. In other words, for our children to be good readers, we need to work on both decoding and comprehension.
To understand what we are reading, we use our vocabulary knowledge plus general and subject-specific knowledge. If we have experienced other similar stories or texts, this helps us, too. For children, sharing books and stories with an adult is very beneficial. An adult reader can help them to understand new words and check their understanding of the story by asking questions and retelling the tricky parts. Adult readers can also provide extra information and context around the story to support the child's understanding and build their general knowledge.
And there is more. Enjoyed reading a story or watching a movie together? Now try retelling that story with your child, perhaps while walking or driving together. Who is in the story? How did the story begin? What happened next? What was the exciting bit? How did the story end up? Storytelling opens up golden opportunities to practice oral language skills and sequencing (arranging things in order). You could also try making up a silly story together. Or ask your child: "Tell me about something that happened at school today." This is worth persevering with even if, like me, you sometimes get the response, "I can't remember!"
In telling even the simplest story, your child will need to use their language skills at text level (choosing the right individual words), sentence level (putting the words together in the right order to create meaning) and text level (sequencing events to tell the story). There is a lot of wonderful, rich learning going on here - as well as connecting and sharing.
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