Language & Communication

1. Develop abilities to listen and understand
2. Develop abilities to speak and communicate
3. Develop literacy concepts and skills

Standards:

1. Derive meaning from verbal and nonverbal cues
2. Listen with understanding to stories, books, directions and conversations
3. Follow directions of increasing complexity
4. Listen and respond to music and rhythm
5. Communicate needs and thoughts through gestures, sounds and/or words
6. Use increasingly complex and varied vocabulary and language structures
7. Use speech, understandable to familiar and unfamiliar listeners
8. Understand concepts of print (book and print awareness)
9. Use a variety of strategies to derive meaning from a text
10. Alphabetic awareness
11. Phonological awareness
12. Understand language structure
13. Associate sounds with written letters
14. Understand and use of writing to represent thoughts or ideas
15. Understand increasingly complex and varied vocabulary used in language and the environment

Skill Areas:

1. Speaking and listening
   • communicating to get needs met by using gestures, words and sentences
   • listening and responding to oral directions
   • using attentive listening strategies (focusing on speaker and attending during large group times)
   • participating in group discussions with meaningful and relevant comments and questions
   • following rules of conversation (taking turns, raising hand to speak in a group, and not interrupting)
   • vocabulary and concept development asking and answering basic questions
   • naming objects and pictures in their environment
   • describing objects by shape, color and size
   • playing with words through rhyme and repetition
   • hearing and manipulating the sounds of spoken language
   • playing with words through rhyme and repetition
   • reciting and singing familiar stories, fingerplays, songs and rhymes
   • clapping words of a sentence and syllables of wordsshowing increasing awareness of words that begin with the same sound
2. Book awareness
   • demonstrating book handling skills
   • understanding that print has meaning
   • using picture clues to aid in comprehension and to make predictions about content
   • beginning to understand what an author and illustrator are
3. Letter name awareness (alphabetic knowledge)
   • recognizing and naming letters
   • differentiating between letters and numerals
   • demonstrating the ability to associate the names of letters with their shape and sound
   • identifying letters in familiar words
   • recognizing own name in print
   • showing an interest in print
   • recognizing that verbal communication can become written communication
   • identifies written sight words within the classroom environment
4. Comprehension
   • understanding and responding to stories read aloud
   • making predictions about what will happen next in a story
   • retelling, dictating and “acting out” stories from books or experiences
   • memorizing predictable text, songs, rhymes, poems, finger plays and simple stories
   • relating stories to personal experience
   • utilizing techniques such as prediction, sequencing, concluding and comparison
5. Writing
   • representing ideas and stories through drawing and pretend writing
   • using letter-like shapes, symbols and letters to convey meaning
   • understanding that writing is a way of communicating
   • printing first and last name and copies print
   • printing from left to right
   • using 3-finger grasp to hold a writing instrument
6. Media and technology
   • listening and responding to variety of media (books, audiotapes, videos and computer games)
   • using a computer (operates a mouse to make selections, follows oral directions given on a computer)

Core Concepts:

1. Convey and interpret meaning
2. Listening and understanding
3. Speaking and communicating verbally & non-verbally
4. Early literacy

Instructional Activity Suggestions

Recommended Points of Assessment: