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McKay School of Education > Project SEEL > Implement > SEEL Lessons

Teaching SEEL Activities

 

1. Strategies for Explicit Instruction

The procedures for explicit instruction that will be taught to SEEL professional development participants have been shown in practice to improve young students' performance. These procedures include

Teachers share the objective with the children, model the target, provide practice with the target, and restate the desired skill as they review it.

2. Practices to Facilitate Instructional Conversations

Success in developing language and literacy skills is tied to effective interaction (Neuman & Roskos, 1997). Researchers recommend interaction that includes planning and carrying out purposeful instructional conversations (Neuman & Roskos, 1997; Neuman, 2006). Accordingly,  SEEL professional development participants are taught to facilitate responsive, reciprocal adult-child interactions which include playful interactive discourse.  Conversations can include using word games for passing turns to children, listening attentatively to children and waiting when they need time to respond, requesting information rather than testing with questions, commenting on children’s actions rather than directing their behavior, and elaborating children’s contributions.

Turn-taking exchanges can be playful and interesting if teachers respond to and expand children’s inputs and draw children into discussions that use language for various purposes: for example, reporting, reasoning, predicting, projecting (Westby, 2006). In the turn-taking context, varied levels of language abstraction (sometimes called decontextualization) can be included (Blank, Rose, & Berlin, 1978; van Kleeck, 2003).

SEEL conversations often begin by discussing what the children are doing during instructional activities. Later children reflect or report on their experiences, describing what they have done. Still later they have opportunities to relate those experiences to stories or books, using their personal experiences and reflections to make inferences about what they read and hear. ("I felt smart when I made a good picture.  Harold must have felt smart when he drew with that purple crayon.")  Thus teachers are able to move children from highly contextualized to decontextualized language use (Cummins, 1986; Westby, 1985; Dickenson et al., 2006). ("When we make something beautiful, we feel good about ourselves.")

3. Use of Multiple Contexts and Activities

Interactive exchanges and other encounters with literacy targets need to happen frequently (Neuman, 2006; Whitehurst & Lonigan, 2001) to deepen skills (Neuman, 2006) and help children become more fluent in using them.  For this reason SEEL teachers learn to provide opportunities for children to practice skills across contexts and activities, including

Teachers engage children in playful practice using varied activity types, including

Thus SEEL avoids the negative effects that have occurred in some early literacy programs that focus on isolated skills outside of meaningful contexts. When a teacher structures lessons and activities so that children associate skills and targets with activities they enjoy and contexts that are part of their day, children find purpose and engagement in reading and writing experiences. Authentic contexts and playful activities promote episodic memory of experiences and examples of skills, enabling children to make predictions and inferences, acquire concepts, and connect or relate experiences to the process of understanding texts (Tulving, 1993; Cain & Oakhill, 2007).

For example, if children have "flown" their red rockets around an activity area touching only things that begin with /r/, they will associate the /r/ sound with the fun of the red rockets and with the everyday items they touched; when they see the letter R in other contexts, they will easily remember it. They may even anticipate or infer an "rrrrrrrr" sound when a rocket (especially a toy rocket) enters a story. The ability to apply new knowledge and skills in a variety of contexts is considered by researchers and educators as evidence of learning (Verhoeven, 2001).

4. Theme-Based Mini-Unit Planning

In addition to providing instruction in meaningful contexts and activities, effective language and literacy programs integrate instruction through thematic units that cross curricular areas (Neuman, 2006). Connecting instruction to content in unit themes--integrating high quality children’s literature--brings purpose and meaning to literacy learning.

This integrated approach to planning embeds literacy skills in thematic units along with such curricular areas as art, math, and social studies. For example, during a unit on mail the teacher might read a book about a mail carrier; conduct an interactive discussion related to "much mixed-up, muddy, moldy mail"; have each student design and create a funny envelope; then put the envelopes in piles and count them while putting them in mailbags.  When approached creatively, phonological awareness and phonics skills can be taught or reinforced in activities involving most themes that seem to occur naturally in early childhood contexts.  Vocabulary and story comprehension develop naturally from most experiences with quality children's literature on or slightly above children's listening comprehension level. Many children's books are written specifically to provide experiences with numbers (e.g.. The Relatives Came by Cynthia Rylant), science (factual or fiction with a few embedded facts--e.g. The Very Hungry Caterpiller by Eric Carle), and other curricular/thematic areas. Oral language develops from interactive instructional conversation on almost any topic appropriate for the classroom. Engaging activities such as story enactments, games, or music can be easily related to a wide range of themes and skills.

5. Procedures to Enhance Engagement.

The SEEL program stresses that teachers must address engagement and motivation along with skill development, especially playful practice which actively engages children’s minds, not just their bodies—associating literacy with enjoyment and success (Neuman, 2006).

By developing  flexibility and creativity, while utilizing a range of emotions and communicative functions, teachers increase their power to promote student engagement.  They can raise children’s affective involvement through

Students are engaged when literacy learning is conceived as a creative and playful activity (Reinking, 2001) and when reading and writing are tied to personal experiences (Gallego & Hollingsworth, 2000). Students who are engaged are able to fuse their conceptual knowledge, skills, and motivation.

In summary, teachers participating in SEEL  learn to support literacy skills in both codes and comprehension by keeping children engaged in instruction, connecting skills and extension activities to themes in books and curricular units, exposing children to examples of skills in varied contexts and activities, and implementing instructional conversations based on strategies that expand and elaborate children’s language and thinking.