All Things CLASS

Hello, 

Any resources to increase vocabulary or meaningful conversations in a preschool classroom?

In my PreK classroom, I have been working on "Strive for  5."  That is 5 back and forth conversations with a student.  This comes from LETRS.  I have really seen it help my quieter students open up and talk much more.

As for vocabulary, doing the 1, 2, 3 read and pointing out tier 2 vocabulary words from books really helps.  I also point out vocabulary words from other books.  We also do a word of the day at least twice a week.  These are tier 3 words and my kids love it.  I have a book I use, but I do not know the name.  It is a snow day here in Los Alamos so I am not in my classroom.  I challenge my students to use these words at home and they come back so excited when they do. 

These are just a few ideas.  I hope these help, if you don't already do them.

-Holly Garcia

When teaching Infants, Toddlers and Preschool we must use language and open ended conversation when conversing with children.

Make sure when in blocks you use language to describe lesson plan or pictured cards on block.

For example: What color is this block? Is that an animal on the picture card? Is it a cat or a dog? Do you have one at home? Dog or Cat?

There are several strategies. I just looked up one of them I could remember and found this resource: four ways to expand your child's language. It explains it, but expansion is taking what they say and growing it out a step or two.  Parallel talk is narration of what they're doing.  "Oh, look, you're picking up your blocks!"   Self-talk is "Oh, look! I'm putting this block in this container so that I can find it later."  as you do it.  Open ended conversations help too.  We used to pick one of these strategies and write it on our lesson plan to focus on that week.  

Sara, thank-you for sharing this resource.  I am currently working with a teacher who has self-talk and parallel talk as a goal so this will be good information to share with her.

Flashcards! I have seen amazing improvements with my one year old class. Children can learn words easier sometimes by looking at said word. But practice always makes perfect 

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Madison Plants
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As a preschool teacher I like to observes each child during small group work and Communicate effectively with children  during times of    conflict and assists children them  as  the  resolve conflicts through expressive language , promoted  self-regulated learning skills. Also periodically discuss about feelings, emotions at meeting time ,sharing  and taking turns in a fun, leraning envitonment. 

I also used flash cards with small group  I like to sit with the children and we have conversation about anything they like to talk about.

I do read a louds and I pull word from the story and then give the children a friendly definition for that word before putting the word on the word wall I use any resources available. I will try all thing helpful to build my children vocabulary

Hi @Zully James,

Thank you for this question, it looks like you've gotten a lot of meaningful responses from your fellow community members! To add to these incredible tips and resources, I wanted to share a couple more that come to mind:

• Blog post - Going Deeper: Language Modeling
• Blog post - Simple ways to promote speech and language development
• Resource - Lunchtime Conversation Starters
• Resource - Tasty Topics from Michelle Rusakowicz, MSEd 

I hope this helps!

Best,
Allison

Hi colleagues , I lean through the years that children start to sing before talk . Music is an excellent resource to development  vocabulary. (twinkle ,twinkle little star)