Category: Oral Language

Wordless Picture Books are FAR from Wordless

4/17/2021

This article was originally shared on the Seidlitz Blog on April 29, 2020.

Imagine you are a second grade student born in America, and you only speak English. You’ve attended English schools until now. But your father’s job has relocated your family to France, and now you are in a classroom filled with students and a teacher who only speak French (a language you have never spoken). The science teacher hands you a book and signals for you to read it. You open the book and find that it is filled with pictures…no words. First a group of horses. A mare feeding a foal. A colt running wild. Then a group of pigs, chickens, cows, etc. Instantly, you begin to think about the information you know about animals. What they are called, where they live, what they eat, etc.

Though you aren’t able to communicate this information in French yet, you are able to follow along with the class and think in English using the schema and background knowledge you have about animals.

Why Use Wordless Picture Books?

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Sentence Stems or Sentence Frames

3/9/2019

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What is the difference and Why should we care?

Well, first and foremost, we should care if we want our students to speak like scholars. If we want our students to be marketable after they graduate. If we want them TO graduate! Then we should care! Sentence stems and frames are scaffolds as students learn language and content.

Sometimes educators use the terms sentence stems, sentence starters and sentence frames interchangeably. You may wonder...are they the same thing? The answer is no, they are are not the same. They have their own form and function.

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A Twist on DOL

11/13/2017

(Daily Oral Language)

Do any of you have a morning warm up where students have to look at a sentence that has mistakes in it and they have to correct it? We used to have our students "edit" a couple of sentences each morning. The sentences were riddled with errors and the kids were asked to find the errors and rewrite the sentence correctly. This was called DOL or Daily Oral Language. I'm not sure why...It was DAILY. That's the only thing correct about the title. It was not oral and it was a terrible example of language.

Building Reading Fluency & Expression

1/10/2017

One of my favorite ways to let students practice reading for automaticity, fluency and expression is with Ear to Ear Reading. There are so many benefits to this easy to implement strategy! Because it is done in pairs (or triplets in rare cases) it lowers the affective filter for students and helps to build interdependence among students.

Wordless Picture Books are FAR from Wordless

Sentence Stems or Sentence Frames

What is the difference and Why should we care?

A Twist on DOL

(Daily Oral Language)

Building Reading Fluency & Expression

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Wordless Picture Books are FAR from Wordless

Sentence Stems or Sentence Frames

What is the difference and Why should we care?

A Twist on DOL

(Daily Oral Language)

Building Reading Fluency & Expression

​Archives

Categories

Articles

Resources

Contact

Archives