Monolingual vs Bilingual

From www.technovatetranslations.com    See an enlarged chart at http://www.technovatetranslations.com/infographics/monolingual-vs-bilingual.shtml

Family Dinner Challenge

This is great info to share with families. 



The simple act of gathering your family around the table to eat may make more of a difference than you ever suspected.


Studies have proven that it can impact almost every area of children's lives. Check out the results family dinners can have below, then learn how you can start making a difference in your family's life right now by joining the 4x4 Family Dinner Challenge.
1. Clean Living and Mental Health
Kids who eat dinner with their families are prone to cleaner living. A study done in 2009 by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University showed that kids who did not eat dinner with their families were twice as likely to use tobacco, marijuana or alcohol. Further studies have shown that teens who eat with their families have lower rates of teen pregnancy and depression.
2. Better Knowledge and Grades
Conversation around the dinner table results in higher grade-point-averages and self esteem. Families who have meals together encourage higher vocabularies in children through telling stories about their days.
3. Family Bonding That Lasts
The bond in families who eat together is much stronger, creating an identity for the family as a unit and a team. It helps family members to stay updated on each other’s lives--and they are more likely to stay in touch as they age.
4. Better Health
For health reasons, it’s wise to get everyone to sit down to a meal together. Family dinners help lower obesity rates and eating disorders in kids and teens. When meals are being prepared with healthier foods and being served regularly, there is less room for bad eating habits to form.

To reap some of the benefits yourself, try to get your family together for a meal at least four times a week. Any meal will do, whether breakfast, lunch or dinner--the key is having some relaxed time to enjoy good food and great company with your eternal family.

Literacy

Reading Aloud

Thanks to Dawn Foutz for sharing these wise insights from Jim Trelease on my FB timeline.  They complement a great book I read--The Reading Promise. 

 

The hidden benefits of reading aloud - even for older kids

Educator Jim Trelease explains why reading aloud to your child –- no matter what her age -- is the magic bullet for creating a lifelong reader.

By Connie Matthiessen

Jim Trelease is the author of the respected, Read-Aloud Handbook, which some parents have called the "read aloud Bible." The book is packed with information — from what really makes kids love reading, to tips for luring kids away from electronics and onto the page, to hundreds of read aloud titles. The Handbook's seventh edition will be published in the spring of 2013 and, at 71 years old, Trelease says it will be his last. We reached Trelease recently in his home in Connecticut and asked him to explain why reading aloud is essential for kids of all ages.
Can you explain the link between reading aloud and school success?
It's long established in science and research: the child who comes to school with a large vocabulary does better than the child who comes to school with little familiarity with words and a low vocabulary.
Why is that? If you think about it, in the early years of school, almost all instruction is oral. In kindergarten through second and third grades, kids aren't reading yet, or are just starting, so it's all about the teacher talking to the kids. This isn't just true in reading but in all subjects; the teacher isn't telling kids to open their textbooks and read chapter three. The teaching is oral and the kids with the largest vocabularies have an advantage because they understand most of what the teacher is saying. The kids with small vocabularies don't get what is going on from the start, and they're likely to fall further and further behind as time goes on.
How does a child develop a large vocabulary even before school starts? Children who are spoken to and read to most often are the ones with the largest vocabularies. If you think about it, you can't get a word out of the child's mouth unless he has heard it before. For example, the word "complicated." A child isn't going to say the word unless he has heard it before – and in fact to remember it, a child probably has to hear it multiple times. (That's not true with swear words, of course. If a child hears his parent swear he'll remember it the first time, and happily repeat it whenever he gets the chance.) But kids have to hear most words multiple times, so it's important that their parents talk to and around them from the time they are very young, because that's how they learn words.

Reading aloud: an advertisement for books

So parents need to talk to their children – but reading aloud is important, too. Because where are children going to be hearing the most words? In conversation, we tend to use verbal shorthand, not full sentences. But the language in books is very rich, and in books there are complete sentences. In books, newspapers, and magazines, the language is more complicated, more sophisticated. A child who hears more sophisticated words has a giant advantage over a child who hasn't heard those words.
Reading aloud also increases a child's attention span. Finally, reading aloud to your child is a commercial for reading. When you read aloud, you're whetting a child's appetite for reading. The truth is, what isn't advertised in our culture gets no attention. And awareness has to come before desire. A child who has been read to will want to learn to read herself. She will want to do what she sees her parents doing. But if a child never sees anyone pick up a book, she isn't going to have that desire.
Why do you think it's important to read to older kids, too?
People often say to me, '"My child is in fourth grade and he already knows how to read, why should I read to him?" And I reply, "Your child may be reading on a fourth-grade level, but what level is he listening at?"
A child's reading level doesn't catch up to his listening level until eighth grade. You can and should be reading seventh-grade books to fifth-grade kids. They'll get excited about the plot and this will be a motivation to keep reading. A fifth-grader can enjoy a more complicated plot than she can read herself, and reading aloud is really going to hook her, because when you get to chapter books, you're getting into the real meat of print – there is really complicated, serious stuff going on that kids are ready to hear and understand, even if they can't read at that level yet.
Reading aloud to your kids is also are good way to grapple with difficult issues. For example, you can tell your child, "I don't want you to hang out with so and so," but that's a lecture that will probably go in one ear and out the other. But if you read a book about a kid who gets in trouble by hanging out with the wrong crowd, your child is going to experience that directly, and she's going to experience it with you at her side, and you can talk about it together. You can ask questions like: "Do you think the boy made the right choice?" "Do you think that girl was really her friend?" When you talk about a book together, it's not a lecture, it's more like a coach looking at a film with his players, going over the plays to find out what went right and what went wrong.

Books to blow your mind

Someone once said that books allow you to examine explosive situations without having them blowing up in your face. Books allow you to develop awareness of people outside your experience and develop a sense of empathy. When I was growing up, I wasn't rich, but by reading books I learned that there are kids out there who are a lot worse off than me, kids growing up with real disadvantages. The wider your world, the more you understand and the more you can empathize.
Another advantage of reading aloud: if you weren't a reader yourself growing up, reading to your kids gives you the chance to meet the child you used to be and read the books you never read. I hear from people all the time, especially fathers, who say, "Wow! I never read The Secret Garden as a child, and I had no idea what I was missing!"
I've had that experience myself, and I was an avid reader as a child, but I mostly read boys' books, like The Call of the Wild. I didn't read the classics like The Secret Garden and Little Lord Fauntleroy, so it was great to have the chance to read them with my kids.
Do you think teachers should be reading aloud to kids even in high school?
Yes, because if you stop advertising, you stop selling. Kids have to read for school but that's not an advertisement for reading. Most of the material kids read in school, no one would read for pleasure. And if all your reading is tied to work, you develop a sweat mentality to reading, so by time you graduate you can't wait to stop reading. You become a school-time reader, not a life-time reader. Of course, kids have to do a certain amount of reading that's tied to work, but you don't want kids to forget that there are books out there to make you laugh, make you cry, and move the soul.
The writer Phyllis Theroux once said that high school is the last stop for gas before the Beltway of adulthood, so the lessons kids get in high school are really important. But in the present climate of testing, there is so much pressure on teachers that few take the time to read aloud. And that's a real loss. Standardized tests have nothing to do with real life, which means that schools are becoming divorced from reality. The challenges I encounter every day as an adult have nothing to do with anything I learned on a test in school. When you reach a crisis in your life, or you encounter someone who needs help, how you react has a lot to do with your sense of empathy and compassion – experience with multiple-choice test questions is not going to help at all.
So teachers are torn between what they know is right and what they're forced to do by regulations. If kids' only experience reading as drudgery, then they're going to avoid it as much as possible. Of course, teachers are busy and have a lot of material to cover, but even if they only devote five minutes a day to the pleasure of reading, at the end of the year when you add those five minutes up, that will be what most kids remember.
Are you disturbed by how ubiquitous electronics are and their impact on reading?
Screens are addictive. You push a button and magic happens – what could be better than that? So it's easy for kids to get hooked on screens.
Parents need to set limits, because kids aren't going to limit themselves. In too many households, one parent is watching the game, the other parent is online shopping, and the kid is in front of a screen, and before you know it, the kid hasn't done any reading in years and the family's intellectual worth is going down the drain. Boys play more video games than girls but girls spend hours Facebooking, instant messaging, and texting – probably more than boys do. The average teen spends 90 minutes a day text messaging, and that's the average, which means lots of kids are doing even more.

The distracted generation

We're entering an age unparalleled since the age of Guttenberg; the world is changing faster than we can keep up with. Today, school districts that used to watch kids suffering as they hauled home 20 to 30 pounds of textbooks are turning to electronic tablets. A student can read a social studies textbook on the iPad. and tap on a hyperlink to, say, watch a PBS special on the Great Depression.
That's the good news. The bad news is that there is evidence that we don't remember information as well when we read it on a screen. Yet people are on screens all the time. We're raising the most distracted generation in the history of the world. The more distractions you add to the agenda, the less well you think. Technology may save space, weight, and time, but there is no science showing that it will save children's minds, especially if they spend all their time on screen and never open a book. So parents have to play a big role. It's up to parents to limit screen time, and to keep reading to kids and continue to plant and encourage their interest in books and reading.

Connie Matthiessen is an associate editor at GreatSchools.

The Fiction vs. Non-fiction Debate

From Stephen Krashen

 

The fiction vs. non-fiction debate.
Submitted to the Wall Street Journal, Dec. 13, 2012
E.D. Hirsch is right when he asserts that we acquire vocabulary through reading (“Vocabulary declines, with unspeakable results,” Dec. 12). He is right when he states that background knowledge helps us understand what we read and thereby stimulates vocabulary development. But his insistence that this reading must be non-fiction is not supported by empirical research.
Study after study shows that self-selected reading, or “free voluntary reading,” results in profound development not only of vocabulary, but also of writing style, grammar, and spelling. It also results in knowledge of a wide variety of subjects. This provides the foundation for making academic texts more comprehensible.
Free voluntary reading often includes non-fiction, but for most people, a great deal of it is fiction.
...

If we are in fact suffering from a vocabulary gap, the solution is better access to a wide range of reading material: more support for libraries, especially for children of poverty, who typically have little access to books at home, at school, and in their communities.
Stephen Krashen
Some sources
Self-selected reading and vocabulary, grammar, spelling, writing style:
McQuillan, J. 1998. The literacy crisis: False claims and real solutions. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Krashen, S. 2004. The Power of Reading. Heineman and Libraries Unlimited.
Krashen, S 2011. Free Voluntary Reading. Libraries Unlimited.
Lee, S. Y. 2005. Facilitating and inhibiting factors on EFL writing: A model testing with SEM. Language Learning 55 (2), 335-374.

Reading and knowledge:
e.g. Stanovich, K., West, R., and Harrison, M. 1995. Knowledge growth and maintenance across the life span: The role of print exposure. Developmental Psychology 31 (5): 811- 826.

Libraries and literacy development:
Krashen, S., Lee, SY., and McQuillan, J. 2012. Is the library important? Multivariate studies at the national and international level. Journal of Language and Literacy Education, 8(1)? 26-36.
Lance, K. C. The Impact of School Libraries on Student Achievement. http://www.lrs.org/impact.php

Poverty and access to books:
Allington, R., S. Guice, K. Baker, N. Michaelson, and S. Li. 1995. Access to
books: Variations in schools and classrooms. The Language and Literacy Spectrum 5: 23-25.
Neuman, S., and D. Celano. 2001. Access to print in low-income and middle
income communities. Reading Research Quarterly 36(1): 8-26.
Original article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444165804578010394278688454.html?mod=djemITP_h
Vocabulary Declines, With Unspeakable Results

¡¡¡Feliz Navidad!!!

The Christmas season is a great time for our Esperanza family to learn new vocabulary, new traditions, new foods, new songs, etc. from a variety of cultures. 

Bring On the Music

Last night we watched the movie The Music Never Stopped based on a true story about the impact music therapy had on a young man who had experienced brain damage. If music can be this powerful in an extreme case such as this it can definitely have an impact on our Esperanza scholars.

A study mentioned in the journal Social Science Quarterly in 2009 reveals that music participation, defined as music lessons taken in or out of school and parents attending concerts with their children, has a positive effect on reading and mathematic achievement in early childhood and adolescence.

The study went onto to mention that certain groups are disadvantaged in access to music education. Families with high socioeconomic status participate more in music than do families with lower socioeconomic status. In addition to social class as a predictor of music participation, ethnicity is also a factor. Asians and Whites are more likely to participate in music than are Hispanics.

We are committed to providing a schoolwide violin/mariachi program for all our Esperanza scholars. We will also encourage teachers to incorporate a variety of music in all feasible ways in their classrooms to not only learn vocabulary and concepts but also to feed the soul.