Level 0: Talking About Actions

Talking

Level 0 Activities help a child develop an “ear” for the spoken language as one vocalizes a variety of sounds. Surrounded with oral talk, while actively engaged in a wide variety of activities, sets the very early foundational building block for reading & writing.

Early Literacy Foundational Skills

• Oral Communication

  • listen and understand that verbal interactions is one method of communicating thoughts, ideas, whats, needs, etc.

• Sentence Meaning

  • listen and understand meaning of a sentence

• Word Meaning

  • listen and understand meaning of a specific word

Talking About Actions

GOAL: Daily face-to-face interactions through a wide variety of activities are the KEY.

Talk about what you're doing and talk about what your child is doing. Adding actions or gestures will add additional support. The important point is consistency with the words, sounds, and gestures used.

MATERIALS:

• none (this is founded on actual activities being done in real time)

EXAMPLES:

Using Actions with Words

“Hello” moving your hand/arm back & forth in a waving motion

“Good-bye” moving your hand/arm back & forth in a waving motion

“Listen” placing your hand by your ear (cupping your ear)

Explaining What One is Doing

ACTION: Wash a child’s hands - take their hand and put soap in it.

SAY: “This is your hand and these are your fingers. We are going to get them clean. Here is some soap. Feel how soft and slippery the soap is. This is warm water. Feel how wet the water is. “

ACTION: Baking cookies

SAY: “Let’s make some cookies. We need lots of different ingredients to make them. Here is the flour. We need to measure the flour into the bowl. Now let’s add some salt and baking soda. See how all these are white in color.

Next, let’s add some sugar. We need two types of sugar - a brown one and a white one. This will make our cookies sweet.

All these ingredients are dry - they are not very wet. We need to add something to help hold the cookie dough together.

These are two eggs. We have to get the wet egg out of the shell so let’s crack them. The shell is hard, we will toss that into the garbage. . . .”

HELPFUL TIPS:

• Always model first until the child is comfortable with this activity.