Unicef conceptualizes school readiness in this way, “children’s readiness for school; schools’ readiness for children; and families’ and communities’ readiness for school.” This framework highlights that families and communities play a big role in children’s school readiness. As Head Start tells us, “children with supportive home learning environments show increased literacy development, better peer interactions, fewer behavior problems, and more motivation and persistence during learning activities.” Parents need to be empowered with tools to support children’s learning at home and need to feel connected to and supported by the local educational community. When children are enrolled in early care programs, teachers can boost parent involvement by sharing meaningful information with families, sending home bilingual learning materials and books to Spanish speaking homes, and requesting and listening to parent feedback. Preschool programs can work to incorporate home visits, parent education, and community outreach in their curriculum. With these strategies, children will arrive at school with increased and vital readiness, confidence, and support.

The local education community also has to strive to be accessible to all families and has to provide high-quality early education in reading, math, and social skills. The Public Policy Institute of California shares that “the children of immigrant parents constitute a large subset of disadvantaged children, and of special concern are linguistically isolated children, that is, children who encounter little or no English in their homes.” They also inform us that children of immigrants make up around half of the preschool aged children in California, of which about 20 percent are in the linguistically isolated subset, and that only one-third of this subset participates in center based preschool care programs. Ensuring that disadvantaged children have increased access to these programs through targeted enrollment initiatives can be a powerful step forward in boosting school readiness for this population. School readiness makes the transition to school less traumatic for the child and family and gives students a strong foundation on which to build their educational future.

Lectura Books has exceptional bilingual children’s books for Infant & Toddler and Preschool ages that will encourage Spanish and English speaking parents to read to their young children. This can be a useful tool to help children to be ready for elementary school.

The post The Importance of School Readiness appeared first on The Latino Family Literacy Project.

Her study, published in the journal, Psychological Science, showed that children who speak more than one language are better at communication than children who speak just a single language.

She wrote: “We took a group of children in the United States, ages 4 to 6, from different linguistic backgrounds, and presented them with a situation in which they had to consider someone else’s perspective to understand her meaning….Children in multilingual environments have social experiences that provide routine practice in considering the perspectives of others. They have to think about who speaks which language to whom, who understands which content, and the times and places in which different languages are spoken…Interestingly, we also found that children who were effectively monolingual yet regularly exposed to another language — for example, those who had grandparents who spoke another language — were just as talented as the bilingual children at this task. It seems that being raised in an environment in which multiple languages are spoken, rather than being bilingual per se, is the driving factor.”

The second study, to be soon published in Developmental Science looked at even younger children, 14-to-16-month-old babies, and found again that being raised in a bilingual or multilingual environment sharpens social skills.

The bottom line for Kindler is being exposed to more than one language seems to facilitate “the basic skills of interpersonal understanding. Of course, becoming fully bilingual or multilingual is not always easy or possible for everyone. But the social advantage we have identified appears to emerge from merely being raised in an environment in which multiple languages are experienced, not from being bilingual per se. This is potentially good news for parents who are not bilingual themselves, yet who want their children to enjoy some of the benefits of multilingualism.”

For bilingual teaching resources and bilingual books, visit www.LecturaBooks.com

The post Communication Skills Better With Bilingual / Multilingual Kids appeared first on The Latino Family Literacy Project.