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).

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.

“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 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

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”

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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!

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.