Language-Literacy – These are the skills of listening, comprehension, vocabulary, recalling and retelling, and emergent reading. To use DAP to help children gain these skills:

• Practice and model active listening techniques.
• Read to the children at a minimum of twice daily.
• Encourage, accept, and respect all forms of child communication and expression.
• Engage in frequent face-to-face verbal conversations with children in English, child’s home language, or American Sign Language and encourage the sharing of home language, if not English.
• Offer language to describe objects, pictures, situations, and events when needed.
• Listen actively to children’s language and speak about personal feelings using clear, simple language. 
• Encourage, repeat, reinforce, write down and display children’s words about objects, facts, situations, and events.
• Model appropriate grammatically correct language without over correcting or calling attention to normal, developmental language errors that will correct themselves with time.
• Offer a variety of experiences for children to strengthen and practice language skills through whole group, small group, and individual discussions, story times, sharing times, snack and meal times and center time conversations.
• Create a literacy rich environment which includes a minimum of two story times daily, a specific learning center for theme-related PLUS books and written materials placed in every other learning center, word walls or other devices on which children’s words are displayed, and formal and informal opportunities for children to interact with written words.
• Use song, chant, rhythm, rhyme, and repetition to help children gain concepts rather than rote memorization techniques.
• Create an environment which values literacy and encourages the desire to read without pressure or developmentally inappropriate measures and devices such as dittos and worksheets
• Offer opportunities for formal reading and phonics experiences for individual children who have shown an interest in and a readiness for these activities

“Readiness to Read”, not “Rush to Read” – This MUST be the motto of a good early childhood education literacy program.

• Forcing literacy skills before readiness is attained is futile, frustrating, and exhausting – just like potty training.
• Put books and written material in ALL Learning Centers and decorate the room with words – especially the children’s words, dictated, scribbled, or printed.  Books must be always available as a child-chosen activity.
• Dump the dittos and worksheets, except for use as ‘busy’ work or relaxed, child-chosen pencil-practice distractions – never as graded tests substituted for real learning. 

“The more that you read, the more things you will know.
The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go” – Dr. Seuss

Next Blog: DAP for the Mind – Math