Abstract
This chapter will discuss how teachers use and further develop strategies to help children expand their cognitive abilities, improve oral language, and express their emotions. The work presented was done with young English language learners children ages 2 to 3, within a family childcare home (FCCH) setting in Miami Dade County. During the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers from family childcare homes noticed children with stress created by the many difficult situations their families were going through. The author developed a pedagogical unit based on the storybook called Wimberly Worries written by Kevin Henkes. This pedagogical unit used the teaching for understanding framework and visible thinking routines. It is the author's goal to present this work to inspire teachers in the creation of similar pedagogical units.
TopTheoretical Framework
Between 2010 and 2020, the Hispanic/Latino population in the United States experienced explosive growth, increasing from 1.6 million in 2010 to 1.9 million in 2020 (Census Bureau, 2020). This growth in diverse populations has provided both increased opportunities as well as new challenges for the education system, tasked with the need to provide educational opportunities to young children who come to the classroom speaking little or no English and may be considered disadvantaged when compared to their English-speaking peers. To address this challenge, teachers are faced with finding new and innovative methods to meet the needs of these diverse populations of children. The educational barriers experienced by children who are non-English speaking and who also have not been exposed to literacy activities within their families in their home language present both a challenge and an opportunity to the educators providing for them in current-day classrooms.
The importance of language as a foundation for children’s school success has been well-documented for later academic success, as well as later success in life. Vocabulary, conversational skills, and children’s ability to think critically are required skills for later learning. Research in language learning also documents the use of children’s native language as an important tool in helping children learn a new language and strengthening their acquisition of vocabulary, conversational skills, and other important skills in a new language.
According to work from Cummins and colleagues (2001), the use of children’s native language strengthens children’s abilities in their second language acquisition. Research conducted in Miami Dade County on Head Start children (Lopez & Greenfield, 2004) demonstrated that when young children learn a second language using their first language as a base, it helps them understand the important components of language development such as syntax, vocabulary, semantics, pragmatics, and phonological awareness in their second language.
The study discussed in this chapter provides a qualitative look at a program that makes use of current research and new practices to create a lesson plan for a group of Hispanic children with Spanish as a first language and English as a second language at a family childcare home. A large percentage of the children enrolled in family childcare homes located in Miami, Florida speak English as a second language and Spanish as their first and home language. Teachers were encouraged to speak children’s native language (Spanish) while facilitating new vocabulary, scaffolding conversations, and encouraging children to think critically. Language plays an important role in the acquisition of vocabulary.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Attachment: Attachment is the strong emotional bond that is present between the caregiver and the child over time (Sorrels, 2017).
Performances for Understanding: These are tasks that help children build and demonstrate their understanding.
Visible Thinking: This term refers to a research-based program that encourages children to think critically and to make their thinking visible to other people (Ritchhart, 2011).
Overreaching Understanding Goals/Throughlines: The overreaching understanding goals or throughlines identify the concepts, processes, and skills that teachers want the students to understand.
Oral Language Development: The ability to express feelings and needs through words.
Early Literacy: Refers to the skills and abilities learned by children before entering school.
Generative Topics: Refers to the concepts or ideas that are interesting for children and connect to their previous experiences.
Dual Language Learners: Young children whose first language is not English, including those learning English for the first time in the preschool setting as well as children who have developed various levels of English proficiency.
Documentation: This is the practice of learners observing, recording, interpreting, and sharing the products of learning to deepen and extend learning (Krechevsky et al., 2013).
Receptive Language: This term refers to the vocabulary that children acquire through interaction with people in the environment (Bzoch et al., 2003).
Children’s Literature: Refers to the selected high-quality children’s books used to inspire children to love reading.
Visible Thinking Routines: These are tools for promoting thinking (Ritchhart, Church & Morrison, 2011).
Ongoing Assessment: Ongoing assessment occurs in the context of performances of understanding, which in turn are anchors to understanding goals.
Dialogic Reading: This is an interactive technique in which the teacher actively interacts with the child as they both talk about the story. The teacher asks questions related to the story and repeats and expands based on the child’s responses using open-ended questions (Whitehurst & Lonigan 1998).