Conference Post # 1: Early Literacy Skills

This was the first of three workshops I attended. I was going, mainly because I had some slight concerns about Katherine, and her lack of interest (or at least not a heck of a lot of interest) in reading. I thought that I might get some ideas of different things I could do to encourage her etc.

I left there with quite a few ideas, as well as quite a few concerns.

I also found out, while there, that I apparently should have some concerns about Julia (Slight if at all) as well.

First...let me point out the statistics.

There is an 88% chance that a child with difficulty reading in grade 1 will still have difficulty in grade 4 (Juel, 1988).

The student is not a moderately skilled reader by the end of 3rd grade in unlikely to graduate from highschool (Snow, Burns, and Griffin, 1998).

28-75% of children with early language delays present with language and literacy difficulties during the later years, even if the delay had been remedaited by five or six years of age (Scarborough and Dobrich, 1990).

Those are some scary stats if you ask me.


I hadn't really thought about how Julia's language delay (which she has basically overcome) could affect her in the future. Granted the range is kind of wide (28-75%) but it's still rather interesting.

I did leave there with a good basis of ideas to try with Katherine to get her motivated to read. One thing I came away with was a link to this website. The Dolch List is a list of the 220 most commonly used words in print and this website offers different printable activities as well as charts to track progress. I plan on printing some of those out and working with her on a more daily basis with these types of things.

I have also decided to start "labeling" more with her...saying things like, "Look at the pretty white clouds" or "Please don't touch the hot stove". Another thing that I will be working on with her...having her understand the difference between a word and a sentence and a paragraph. I hope that some of this works, and I think it will. She responds well to me.