Close the Vocabulary Gap! Proven Strategies ECE Administrators Can Use to Help Teachers Enhance Vocabulary in Their Classrooms by Julie Wood, Ed.D.

This session is part of the Follett Growing Readers Series

 A child’s vocabulary is their passport to understanding and interpreting a wide range of texts. Unfortunately many children from low-income settings enter school with significantly smaller vocabularies than their more economically-advantaged peers. Hart & Risley’s (1995) research with young children showed a 30-million word gap by age three. This gap has an enormous impact on school success, with longitudinal research showing a strong correlation between the richness of vocabulary at age three and language test scores in vocabulary, listening, syntax and reading comprehension at ages 9 and 10. Fortunately, there are many proven strategies to help develop young children’s vocabulary skills: low-cost initiatives that can be easily implemented by parents and educators across a wide economic spectrum. As an administrator, you need to know about these strategies and the implications they have for teachers and parents in your program.

In this webinar, Dr. Wood will present the vocabulary acquisition strategies that research repeatedly shows to be effective. Dr. Wood will also draw upon her own experiences as the former Director of Three to Third, a school reform initiative (sponsored by Harvard University, the Boston Mayor’s Office, and Boston Public Schools) that aimed to increase literacy development for students ages three to the third grade. Specifical strategies Dr. Wood will present include:

• Dialogic reading

• Oral language development on the go

• Reading fiction and nonfiction aloud

• Building content-area-specific language

• Enlisting parents through home visits

• How digital technologies can help

• What administrators can do to support implementation of these strategies.

Attend this session and you will be entered to win a CUSTOM Door prize!

When you attend the Growing Readers Series webinars, you will automatically have a chance to win a collection of books and/or other resources customized to your specifications with the personalized expert guidance of the literacy specialists at Follett Early Learning.

All sessions are 1.5 hours long, and include a brief announcement from our sponsor. 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM Eastern Time. Take a look at the other webinars in the Early Childhood Investigations Lineup