Pocket Reading Coach – Sign up today! January 16, 2010

Hello all!

I’m offering a free literacy coaching service via text messaging. If you or a friend have a 2-5 year old child and an interest in receiving free text messages to your mobile phone, sign up today.

The program that I’ve designed is a research-based script for you to use when reading and interacting with your kids. The Pocket Reading Coach is designed to help parents enhance their child’s emerging literacy and pre-literacy skills. Submit your information to sign up today!
Or, feel free to email me at cdrew1 AT yahoo DOT com or metathreads AT gmail DOT com

Click here

I earned my Ph.D. in English as a literacy studies scholar. I am also a literacy curriculum developer and consultant – in addition to teaching college writing.  This program is based in part on a PBS Ready to Learn study funded by the U.S. Department of Education.

The text messages you will receive are based on proven literacy research and best practices. However, they are adapted to fit this new mode of delivery – text messaging (also known as SMS).  The objective of this initial offering is to attempt to measure parent response to the literacy mini-lessons and to attempt to get a sense of parent satisfaction with the service.

Below is an example of the type of text messages you will receive – accompanied by a brief description of research that explains the value of the mini-lesson (although, you would not receive the supporting research, just the text message that aggregates and applies the research in the form of the Pocket Reading Coach).

Text:     Select a book to read with your child. As you read, either model or ask your child to identify the front of the book, point to a word, count how many times a letter appears on a page or discuss the role of the author/illustrator.

Supporting Research:     “Knowledge of book and print concepts may seem trivial; however, research indicates the importance of book and print awareness for later reading success (National Center for Family Literacy, 2007; Snow, Burns , & Griffin, 1998 – qtd in Beauchat, Blamey and Walpole. “Building Preschool Children’s Language and Literacy One Storybook at a Time in The Reading Teacher 63:1, 2009, p. 34).

Talking to your infants and toddlers November 23, 2009

Within the Meta-threads curriculum, as well as in presentations and other Meta-threads-related writing that I have done, I have vigorously conveyed the importance of early language intervention. Educators, psychologists and even neuroscientists have published research indicating the importance of actively (and positively!) addressing your infant and toddlers as a way of priming their brains and minds for explosive language development.  For example, Lise Eliot, a neuroscientist who has specialized in researching the developing brains and minds of infants and toddlers, has persistently revealed the important connections between babies’ brain and language development to the hearing, seeing and feeling of language.  Eliot writes about this in her book, What’s Going On In There?How Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life (1999):

Speech is without a doubt the most important form of stimulation a baby receives. When parents talk to their babies, they are activating hearing, social, emotional, and linguistic centers of the brain all at once, but their influence on language development is especially profound. Even before birth, the speech that babies hear biases their later language perception, as described in Chapter 10; newborns prefer their own mother’s voice, their native language, and perhaps even a Dr. Seuss story, all because of a few weeks’ of muffled language exposure in the womb. But while prenatal experience is concerned with the more global, musical quality of speech—the pitch, intonation, and stress patterns of mother’s voice or Cat in the Hat—language has a much more specific effect after birth.  Now every vowel and consonant is critical for honing the neural systems that will eventually understand and produce language.

Language lies quietly in wait during the first twelve to eighteen months of a child’s life. Though you can see only the merest hints of it in infancy, it grows like an air bubble submerged deep in the sea, rising and expanding until finally somewhere in the middle of the second year, it explodes at the surface for all to hear. (267-8)

In other words, babies need to actively experience language. It is while babies are silently observing, or not so silently cooing, crying and babbling (important practice activities that are part of language development), that the language centers of their brains are being prepped for the explosion that happens somewhere in the second year of life.  Eliot emphasizes this moreso elsewhere – that language experiences in social situations are equally if not MORE crucial to linguistic development than anything else. In fact, there is research that demonstrably establishes that quantity of linguistic interaction with caregivers directly impacts both IQ and quality of linguistic skills later in a toddler/child’s life.

What does this mean? And how can parents help maximize the linguistic development of  our children? The answer is pretty simple: talk to your children! Engage them in conversations. Tell them about your day when you pick them up from preschool. Listen to them coo and babble and respond to them.  Even at 9 and 12 months of age your baby will be picking up on important social cues about conversation exchange, phoneme awareness, the rhythms of her native language, how to form words with the mouth, tongue and cheeks and many other small but important details of language development.

The impact of simple, daily literacy lessons October 29, 2009

Ready To Learn – at pbskids.org/read – has some interesting research on the effects of learning letters with cell phones.  This creative approach to using cell phone technology to deliver lessons on letters of the alphabet has some interesting findings, including:

“Participants reported statistically significant changes from preintervention
to postintervention on activities targeted by the intervention. Both groups
reported asking their children more frequently to look for letters on signs
or on printed materials around the house. The lower-income group also
reported asking their children more frequently to find objects around the
house that start with a certain letter. Participants from lower-income
households were more likely to report they coviewed the letter video clips
with their children.” (Horowitz et. al, vii)

“Among lower-income participants, more than three-fourths believed to a
good extent or great extent that the letter video clips affected their
children’s letter knowledge. Among participants living above the poverty
line, approximately half believed so. When asked specifically about the
number of letters participants’ children knew, both groups indicated an
increase from pre- to postintervention, and this difference was statistically
significant for participants living above the poverty line.” (Horowitz et. al vii)

Of relevance to fans of Meta-threads are at least two important commonalities between the cell phone curriculum and the Meta-threads curriculum. First, both approaches make literacy lessons highly visible to BOTH children and care-givers. The fact that the literacy lessons are easily accessible is one of the reasons children benefit so greatly.  When the letters and words are made easily available, and when their presence is right in front of the participants’ eyes it facilitates higher rates of interaction between kids and parents – which in turn heightens awareness and, over time, literacy knowledge.

Second, the lessons on the cell phones and the Meta-threads lessons come in small, quick and easy formats. They also come consistently. Thus, the curricula helps kids and parents develop expectations for learning new information; it helps create good learning habits.

I love the innovation of the Ready to Learn cell phone curriculum. One drawback is, of course, the expensive hardware in order to participate in the PBS-sponsored program.  Our goal at Meta-threads is, eventually, to make our curriculum easily accessible to as wide a range of parents and young learners.

Babies are smarter than you think! August 17, 2009

In this August 17th, NYTimes opinion piece, University of California Psychology professor Alison Gopnik explains how babies are smarter than we give them credit for.  Gopnik summarizes a handful of studies as examples of how babies’ brains learn by playing and “exploring.”  Babies are commonly thought to be easily distracted. They can’t pay attention to anything for very long. This is not true, says Gopnik: The issue is that they are paying attention to evertying.

Babies learn by observing and experimenting through unstructured play. Gopnik argues that learning videos or “the perfect toy” is not really conducive to enhancing the brain development of your child because babies learn best by experimenting and figuring out on their own. Gopnik cites observation and immitation of parents and other human as two powerful ways for babies to learn. This is exactly the concept at the heart of Meta-threads baby and toddler lines of clothing.  We incorporate words that can be used with interactions with your child at any time, spontaneously, at unexpected moments when their or your attention turns to the word, color, shape, texture, etc. of your baby’s attire.

Check out Gopnik’s piece by clicking here.

Gopnik is the author of The Philosophical Baby.

Other similar books: The Scientist in the Crib by Alison Gopnik, Andrew N. Meltzoff, and Patricia K. Kuhl

What’s Going on in There?: How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five years of Life by Lise Eliot

A new word every day. July 16, 2009

Challenge yourself and impress your peers by experimenting with one new word a day. Or, if you want to have it really sink in, focus on one word over the course of two or three days.  Repetition is key to mastery.  You can follow Meta-threads on Twitter or on Facebook to get a fresh and fun word of the day. We always provide you with a sample sentence so you can see how the word is used in context.

Here’s an example of what you will find: Word of the day: usufruct n. the legal right of using and enjoying the fruits or profits of something belonging to another (see m-w.com). “The upper class’s knowledge of various resources allowed the gains granted from usufruct to perpetuate their class status”

You can follow on Twitter by clicking here.

Become a fan of Meta-threads on Facebook.

Baby talk July 14, 2009

One of the things we have to be aware of with youngsters is that they pick up on the behaviors and actions that adults model. When you think they aren’t looking or listening, they are! Such observations are how mini-humans learn how to talk, how to listen, how to take turns, how to carry themselves, socialize, etc. I always encourage folks to have sophisticated, adult conversations in front of their children. Why? Because even if the kids can’t follow the concepts or the gist of the convo, they’re still being exposes to “rich and varied” language, they are being exposed to complex sounds the nuances of which are being soaked up in their brains.  Having adult conversations around our children, however, should not preclude us from speaking with lower levels of diction appropriate to our children’s levels of understanding.

For those of you with babies and young children, how do you talk to them? What are things you do with your child that you think is effective for expanding their vocabulary and helping them with their language skills? We’d love to hear!

Meta-threads® May 30, 2009

Welcome to the Meta-threads® blog!  We have established this space as an interactive way of sharing ideas about our garments.  As you know, if you’ve purchased one of our products, the Meta-threads mission is to inspire kids to play in new, creative and fun ways the the symbols, images, formulas and words that are important to their intellectual development.

As a way of continuing to introduce creative and fun ways of developing learning and language skills we endeavor to post weekly ideas for how to use your Meta-threads garments with your child or in your classrooms.

If you have examples of successful or creative ways for using your Meta-threads clothing we welcome your comments and ideas.