More Fun Means More Learning

Beyond a Bedtime Story

Hopewell Valley Student Podcasting Network

Show Name: Beyond a Bedtime Story

Episode Title: More Fun Means More Learning

Episode #2

You are listening to Beyond a Bedtime Story the podcast with your host Emily.

In this episode of Beyond a Bedtime Story the Podcast we discuss fun literacy activities (that you can incorporate at home!) for both sound work and comprehension as they appear in research, mentorship, and the classroom.

Segment 1: Researched Literacy Techniques

Hi! I’m your host Emily, and welcome back to Beyond a Bedtime Story: A Parent’s Guide to Children’s Reading. In today’s episode, we will be discussing cool, engaging techniques that will be fun for your child. I will begin by describing those that I’ve researched, while the following sections will delve into anecdotes from practices that I’ve observed.

Teaching must consider the formation of phonological or phonemic awareness, when children “hear and manipulate the distinct sounds in spoken language” (Farkas 2000). In addition to establishing technicalities and building fundamentals, instruction focuses on the practice of decontextualized language: talking about ideas beyond the text that consider a non-present audience, background information, narrative, or explanation.

• students’ “comprehension and sense of story structure were improved over children in the control groups” when their read-alouds were accompanied by role-play, retelling, and reconstructing through pictures (Morrow 1988).
• Cahill and Gregory (2016) investigated a Kindergarten classroom where students daily engaged in the practice of creating and sharing stories. The process involves students drawing and then verbally narrating a story, in partnerships or groups, associated with the picture they drew. Verbally sharing the story was a scaffolding technique that ensured underdeveloped writing skills would not hinder the practice of creative writing.

Segment 2: Mentorship Anecdotes - Comprehension

Welcome to segment two, we’re going to pick right back up and dive into the storytelling activities that I witnessed through mentorship and how they improved decontextualized language skills (comprehension of the text).

• Mentorship explanation
• Creativity when developing stories
• Replicate at home

Segment 3: Classroom Activities - Sound Work

The final segment of the show will unpack intriguing sound techniques from the Kindergarten classrooms I observed that children really loved.

• Students tap out each letter then drag their pinched finger through the air to sound out the whole word
• stretching vowel sounds: moving both hands in a roller coaster motion
• very fun, thus they were happy and self-sufficient in using it.
• bag of objects: “wuh” (for the letter W)
• students were visibly excited when it was introduced
• teacher would describe each object and students would guess what it was before she displayed it on the whiteboard

Music Credits:

• Lawrence by TrackTribe
• Palace of Roses by Aakash Gandhi
• The Urban Groove by Hanu

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