Elevating Words

The research is sobering:

The landmark Hart-Risley study on language development documented that children from low-income families hear as many as 30 million fewer words than their more affluent peers before the age of 4.

By the time children from middle-income families with well-educated parents are in third grade, they know about 12,000 words. Third grade children from low-income families with undereducated parents who don’t talk to them very much have vocabularies of around 4,000 words, one-third as many words as their middle-income peers.

With young children in your care a substantial portion of the day, exposing them to rich language is critical.  We do not need to “dumb down” the way we speak with children.  We need to elevate it!

Last night we played a game at our monthly Early Achievers Reflective Practice group.

The participants broke up into 5 teams.  There were given several very simple sentences.  We called them “Penny Words”.  To start, they took that penny word statement and put a penny into a box.  The challenge then, was to elevate a word or words in that statement to make it a “nickel” statement.  Then a “dime” statement and even a “quarter” statement.  Each team had a bag of change and several penny word statements.  There was lots of laughter and sounds of coins clanking as they used their incredible creativity to elevate the statements.  We even challenged them to come up with a statement worthy of a “Buck”!  And we challenged them to create their own penny words to elevate.

Try it:

Penny Word	This is a big pumpkin.
Nickel Word
Dime Word
Quarter Word

Here are some more:

This is a good lunch today.

Let’s look at the pictures in this book.

I am so happy it is sunny today.

You can sure run fast.

A doctor helps people.

Today, see if you can give the children in your care some rich, interesting, quarter words!