Maria Lowenstein, Editor at Learning A-Z, talks about different ways to build students' reading, listening, and comprehension skills. Reading books regularly makes a huge difference, but you can also utilize environmental print (signs, menus, billboards, or any kind of text that you might find in the environment) and oral language to help kids get exposure to words and language in a variety of ways.
Hi. My name is Maria Lowenstein, and I'm an Editor for the content development team.
One of the things I want to talk to you about today is print-rich environments. A couple of different things that we can do -- I know that you hear this all the time, and that's books and reading to our children. And it really is that important. Read, read and read, right? We say it all the time, and it really, really makes a difference. Another way is through environmental print. So environmental print we see all over the streets, from the signs that we may see in front of restaurants -- bring that up, talk to the kids about that print.
Another thing that we can do is talk. So spoken language is very important, it's what we call oral language, right? Oral language is the first step to the kids being able to understand written language, right? We need both. And this is why we do these types of activities; to get our students ready to be able to decipher words, read words, to code words, and finally be able to pull meaning from text in the form of comprehension. So the more we do these types of activities, the more we're going to get our kids, our students, ready to be able to do that.
