Literacy Development.

Some of the alpacas’ neighbours who live in the orchard next to their paddock. They can have conversations through the gate if they choose, although the alpacas have never seen chicks this small because they are locked in a pen with their mother until they are big enough not to be attacked by a cat or a bird of prey.

Jj is for Jottings 19. Literacy Development.

There is a close relationship between listening/speaking (oral language) and reading/writing (written language).
From early on in life we listen, think and talk. We THINK in oral language and pictures in our minds. We READ and WRITE by building another layer onto the listening, thinking and talking. Therefore, if oral language is reduced or imperfect in any way, we have a faulty base on which to build written language. It is like trying to build a brick wall on a foundation of sand.
Not all children who have early speech and language problems will have difficulty in learning to read and write, but about 50% will. Many children beginning school do not have strong enough language skills to support learning to read and write, even if they don’t have any glaringly apparent speech or language problems.
Speech/language problems can occur at sound, word or sentence level.
Sound Level: Difficulty in producing sounds.
Not being able to hear the individual sounds in a word.
Word Level: Not understanding the meanings of words.
Not being able to remember familiar words.
Not knowing how or why to change parts of words to change
meaning eg. Adding an ‘s’ to make a plural.
Sentence Level: Not understanding or using the grammatical rules of
language. 
Continue reading

Frequent Errors Made by Primary School Children.

Sam’s had enough and Marshmallow is starting to make her move.

Jj is for Jottings 13. Frequent Errors Made by Early to Mid Primary Children (and, when I come to think about it, secondary students as well because one flows on to the other – of course).
In list form:
1. Using capital letters mixed in with lower case. I recommend a good alphabet book to fix this – “Aa is for Alpacas”, for example(!) For some reason using B rather than b is common, even in the middle of a word. Continue reading

Quick – and Alarming – Statistics.

Meet Sam’s friend, Marshmallow – a bantam with plenty of attitude. You’ll see a little sequence over the next few posts. She’s in the distance, admittedly, but there’ll be a close-up later on. Sam is eating some dried food.

Jj is for Jottings 12: Some quick statistics.
An Australian study done in 2010 found that 20% of 4-5 year old children were assessed as having a speech impairment.
Following on from that a separate study showed that, from a sample of parents who had expressed concerns about their child’s ability to talk and produce speech sounds, 60.4% did not attempt to access any speech pathology services. In fact they did nothing about it at all. Continue reading