DR. Pelletier (2011) Suggests Practical Research-based Strategies for Parents and Educators
I use the following strategies, taken directly from Dr. Pelletier's (2011) article, in my classroom to promote literacy skills in my kindergarten students. Feel free to use these strategies at home; helps keep your child's learning consistent.
1. Oral language development should be an explicit focus.
• Build on conversations introduced by the child by asking questions.
• Focus conversations to draw descriptive language from the child – talk about how
things look, feel, taste, smell or work, and how they make you feel.
• Elicit mature word choices by asking children to think of alternate words with the same
meaning.
• Offer children opportunities to tell stories. Plan for play as a critical context
for children’s language and cognitive development.
2. Set up classroom time and space to encourage children’s socio-dramatic play.
• Document children’s play through transcripts and photographs.
• Engage actively in children’s play.
• Try out play planning, scribing what children say they will play.
• Discuss game playing (rules, turn-taking) and use specific vocabulary (beginning, luck,
chance).
3. Capitalize on environmental print for early literacy development.
• Take children on neighbourhood or school walks and draw attention to purposes and
meanings of signs.
• Read books about environmental print (e.g., Signs Around Us, City Signs).
• Engage children in making environmental print books, using upper/lowercase and a
variety of fonts, formats and styles.
• Consider the perspective of the “reader” (relates to media literacy).
4. Consider that phonological awareness moves from words to rhymes to syllables
to sounds.
• Have children attend to words, syllables, rhymes and phonemes.
• Clap hands to count out the syllables in familiar words and names.
• Use songs to emphasize rhymes, play pattern games with rhymes.
• Have children play with phonemes by inventing songs.
• Play word games that emphasize the structure of language, teach children
to blend or delete individual sounds to form words and match words based
on initial sounds.
5. Promote recognition of alphabet letters and sounds.
• Exploit children’s own names to help them hear the “sound” of letters.
• Provide opportunities to use invented spelling. Help children to sound out when they
are writing. Model the process.
• Encourage creative writing, journal stories, labelling pictures; provide note paper in
dramatic play areas.
6. Create opportunities to actively engage with print.
• Draw children’s attention to the surface features of written text (e.g., ask children
where to begin and end reading and which words to pay attention to on the page).
• Point to and refer to the title and the names of the author and the illustrator.
• Raise curiosity by discussing illustrations or other interesting features on the cover.
• Point to and discuss punctuation marks. Ask, “What is this for?”
7. Engage in shared reading to promote motivation and literacy development.
• Use different voices to give storybook characters a unique personality and to
emphasize the meaning of punctuation marks or text features such as enlarged or
bold text.
• Facilitate children’s active role in telling the story by asking questions about the story
or the pictures in the book. Allow children to interrupt to ask questions.
• Discuss the meaning of unfamiliar words.
• Use nursery rhymes to promote literacy development: relate nursery rhymes to
children’s own experiences; engage children in dialogue that extends beyond the
nursery rhyme; draw children’s attention to rhymes; recite familiar passages from
nursery rhymes or songs; have children guess which nursery rhyme or song the
passage is taken from.
8. Build reading comprehension as the ultimate goal.
• Enhance storybook comprehension by reading the story out loud two or more times,
explaining word meanings.
• Guide story retelling by questions that prompt children to name characters, identify
the setting, tell what happened, draw conclusions (the PEER strategy offers an
approach – Prompt the child to say something about the book/Evaluate the child’s
response in a positive way/Expand the child’s response by rephrasing and adding
information/Repeat the prompt to make sure the child has learned).
• Guide story comprehension using a variety of prompts that have been shown to be
effective (e.g.,the CROWD strategy – Completion prompts/Recall prompts/Open-ended
prompts/Wh – prompts [what, where, why and how]/Distancing prompts [to help
children relate to experiences outside the book).
1. Oral language development should be an explicit focus.
• Build on conversations introduced by the child by asking questions.
• Focus conversations to draw descriptive language from the child – talk about how
things look, feel, taste, smell or work, and how they make you feel.
• Elicit mature word choices by asking children to think of alternate words with the same
meaning.
• Offer children opportunities to tell stories. Plan for play as a critical context
for children’s language and cognitive development.
2. Set up classroom time and space to encourage children’s socio-dramatic play.
• Document children’s play through transcripts and photographs.
• Engage actively in children’s play.
• Try out play planning, scribing what children say they will play.
• Discuss game playing (rules, turn-taking) and use specific vocabulary (beginning, luck,
chance).
3. Capitalize on environmental print for early literacy development.
• Take children on neighbourhood or school walks and draw attention to purposes and
meanings of signs.
• Read books about environmental print (e.g., Signs Around Us, City Signs).
• Engage children in making environmental print books, using upper/lowercase and a
variety of fonts, formats and styles.
• Consider the perspective of the “reader” (relates to media literacy).
4. Consider that phonological awareness moves from words to rhymes to syllables
to sounds.
• Have children attend to words, syllables, rhymes and phonemes.
• Clap hands to count out the syllables in familiar words and names.
• Use songs to emphasize rhymes, play pattern games with rhymes.
• Have children play with phonemes by inventing songs.
• Play word games that emphasize the structure of language, teach children
to blend or delete individual sounds to form words and match words based
on initial sounds.
5. Promote recognition of alphabet letters and sounds.
• Exploit children’s own names to help them hear the “sound” of letters.
• Provide opportunities to use invented spelling. Help children to sound out when they
are writing. Model the process.
• Encourage creative writing, journal stories, labelling pictures; provide note paper in
dramatic play areas.
6. Create opportunities to actively engage with print.
• Draw children’s attention to the surface features of written text (e.g., ask children
where to begin and end reading and which words to pay attention to on the page).
• Point to and refer to the title and the names of the author and the illustrator.
• Raise curiosity by discussing illustrations or other interesting features on the cover.
• Point to and discuss punctuation marks. Ask, “What is this for?”
7. Engage in shared reading to promote motivation and literacy development.
• Use different voices to give storybook characters a unique personality and to
emphasize the meaning of punctuation marks or text features such as enlarged or
bold text.
• Facilitate children’s active role in telling the story by asking questions about the story
or the pictures in the book. Allow children to interrupt to ask questions.
• Discuss the meaning of unfamiliar words.
• Use nursery rhymes to promote literacy development: relate nursery rhymes to
children’s own experiences; engage children in dialogue that extends beyond the
nursery rhyme; draw children’s attention to rhymes; recite familiar passages from
nursery rhymes or songs; have children guess which nursery rhyme or song the
passage is taken from.
8. Build reading comprehension as the ultimate goal.
• Enhance storybook comprehension by reading the story out loud two or more times,
explaining word meanings.
• Guide story retelling by questions that prompt children to name characters, identify
the setting, tell what happened, draw conclusions (the PEER strategy offers an
approach – Prompt the child to say something about the book/Evaluate the child’s
response in a positive way/Expand the child’s response by rephrasing and adding
information/Repeat the prompt to make sure the child has learned).
• Guide story comprehension using a variety of prompts that have been shown to be
effective (e.g.,the CROWD strategy – Completion prompts/Recall prompts/Open-ended
prompts/Wh – prompts [what, where, why and how]/Distancing prompts [to help
children relate to experiences outside the book).
For references, click here.