You’re listening to Parenting in the First Three Years, the place where we explore the strategies and soul of parenting from pregnancy through the first three years of life. I’m your host, Ann McKitrick. Thank you so much for joining me.
Hey there. I am so glad to have you here with me today. I have an amazing guest. Her name is Gabrielle Holt and you are going to meet her in just a minute. But, what Gabby and I are going to talk about is, what can you do in these very early years? I know when your children are zero to three they’re still very, very little, they’re learning so many things, but what, that you can do now that will support them a little bit later when they begin to start school. I know it seems like such a far off thing at this point, but yesterday I was in the swimming pool with my little niece and her daughter, who’s going to start kindergarten this fall.
And she was telling me that the school that she’s going to, they have uniforms that they have to wear and the uniforms that they’re required to buy for this particular school are pants that have a snap on them and her daughter doesn’t know how to snap her pants yet. And so in the next few weeks, they’ve got to figure out how to snap her pants so she can manage herself during the day while she’s at school in kindergarten. And so this is just one of those things that Maybe we don’t even think about until it’s time for your kid to go.
And then you go, Oh wait, Oh my gosh, this is what we needed to be working on all of this time. And so that’s really what we are going to be exploring in this podcast. and what we’re going to tell you is what can you do to support your child? As they begin school.
And so let’s get started with this great conversation.
Welcome Gabby to the podcast. I’m so glad to have you back again. You are a frequent guest and, why don’t you introduce yourself? Just kind of tell us a little bit about who you are, what you love and what you do with your work.
Thank you so much. And I always enjoy getting to be on your podcast. I am the infant toddler program coordinator at Montessori country day school, in Houston Texas. also do a number of Montessori trainings now, working for different Montessori teachers training organizations around the country and for our national organization. and in my free time, I also am a research assistant at the Language Interaction and Language Acquisition in Children Lab. we call it the Lilac Lab at the University of Texas at Dallas. so my whole life’s work is spent. focused on infants, toddlers, and the adults who serve them. And that’s really where I get to have my own joy is in watching tiny children grow and develop and watching adults feel really confident in their skills to care for them.
Yeah, yeah, and that’s really the thing that has connected us over the years is just how much we both love to talk about babies and how they learn and think and all those kinds of things. It’s always fun to find somebody who’s as enthusiastic as I am about it. So, so we’re talking about literacy and of course, At this age, it’s not literacy, it’s very early literacy, or what we call emergent literacy.
And so, let’s just talk about that. what parents need to know, and what your thoughts are, and how you train teachers, and how you help people understand how to help children have those skills that they need. So, I know that telling stories with children is, you know, kind of, we always hear about reading books, right?
But what’s the difference between reading a book and telling a story and why is storytelling so important? Especially when they’re so little.
I think that’s such a fun question to think about. like I said, I have been all over the country and world getting to train adults here recently. I got to spend some time in Africa in late May, early June, both in Egypt and in Zimbabwe. it was really amazing to see the power of storytelling in each of those cultures. in Egypt, we were working with displaced Palestinian families and storytelling wasn’t just supporting language development, but it was supporting the child’s. sense of identity, understanding their history, understanding their culture. I think when we think about storytelling, it’s more than just books on the page, but how are we passing the stories of things that are important to us, whether in our family, in our culture, in our society, and how do we keep that oral history living? it’s more than just those literacy skills, understanding the beginning, middle, and end of something, but it is that sense of belonging and identity that comes through. storytelling that I think is so important for our young children.
Mm hmm. So what would that look like if your child is, you know, and you are driving to maybe a relative’s house. Maybe you’re driving to your own parent’s house. So your child is going to see their grandparent. What would be a way that you could talk in the car about a story that would be meaningful and also do this work that you’re talking about?
time to practice storytelling because there’s little else you can really do when it comes to a story. You can’t sit back there with your child as you’re driving and turn the pages of a book and point to things on the page. Instead, you really have to be in the car. Be creative with what you’re telling them to get that mental imagery working, for them to start using their imagination to picture the words you’re saying. if you were on your way to a grandparent’s house, maybe you’re telling a story about something you did with your grandparents when you were a child. we always love hearing those back in, back in my day when I was your age stories, because it connects us to the people in our family who we love and care about.
And we get to see those similarities, right.
When we’re thinking about the way a toddler’s memory develops, even telling stories about things you did the last time you were at grandparent’s. Jog that memory and help them develop those memories and that memory formation piece.
Yeah. And I think grandparents kind of have a tendency to do things, in a way that does create memories. You know, my kids used to always talk about how my parents had, hard butterscotch candies at their house. And, you know, that was just, part of, part of my parents just loved butterscotch and they always had a dish of butterscotch candies, but they were always out there for the kids to eat as well.
And, that’s kind of part of their grandparent memories, you know. when you were in, Egypt, tell me, were there any specific ways that, you were helping teachers to understand how to help parents with that whole idea of storytelling, or how did that work?
Yeah, I think the piece that was so interesting there is we were working with parents helping them become more coordinated. in the sense that they felt like they were qualified to be able to continue their children’s learning and so it’s helping them understand the power of learning.
What they already do ingrained in their cultural practices as storytelling and how can we use stories to help meet academic aims and help really connect children to, what their world is. so I think that was the piece that’s so important is we can use stories to tell. So many different things about our world.
We can tell stories about math. We can tell stories, that have really descriptive language and metaphors. We can tell stories about our history and keep those alive, especially for the population we were working with. And so I think that’s the piece that we really were helping parents who are becoming teachers understand is you have the tools, we just have to be creative with how we’re using them.
Right. And the fun thing about storytelling or just oral language in general is you can really play with it, you know, and one of the things around early literacy is just the sing song of words or the rhythm of words and the way that you speak to children and, Rhyming words and alliteration and all of those kinds of things that are just ways that we play with language.
And it seems like we’re just playing, but actually it’s gaining or, introducing your child to skills that they will need to know when they get into later preschool or into kindergarten, another thing I was thinking as you were talking about storytelling is that children love to tell stories too, they can retell their own stories, but they can also retell.
a book that has been read to them every single day of their life, and even tell the story as they go through the pages of the book. and I think that’s a really neat skill for them as well.
Children’s stories are so creative. one of the ways that, we can also kind of support that is by just giving our children the space to tell stories and asking them if they have a story for us to tell.
Okay, so as we’re talking about things that parents really kind of need to know about early literacy or emergent literacy, tell me about the ABC song. Tell me what we all need to know about the ABCs and that, where that fits with three year olds.
When we look at what’s marketed to young children, everything has ABCs on it. Everything sings the ABC song. Even for infants, they push a button and it starts singing the ABCs. And somehow, marketers have done a really good job of making us think, The ABCs are literacy when really, knowing letter names makes up a really small part of what children need to be successful when learning to read and write. And so when we think about what really matters, It’s understanding the sounds and rhythms of our language that really is the most important part. Of course, exposure to symbols comes along through reading books and children hear the ABC song so they learn it quickly, but when we shift our focus to more on the sounds and rhythms of our language, that’s when we see children really being able to feel confident in their understanding of language and develop those reading skills because they’re able to. manipulate language. They’re able to hear, the sounds of language and then sound out words when that time comes.
So would you expect, three year olds to begin to be interested in letters?
Sometimes we see children who are interested in letters, but that’s often because it’s been what something they’ve been hyper exposed to in their environment.
People in their life are really interested in them learning letters. But we don’t always see that correlate with them being able to read early being able to read is more than just knowing your letters. if I see a word, I have to understand that symbols on a page have meaning, I’m able to understand the sounds of the language, and I’m even able to know what that word is saying. like let’s take the word cat, for example. If I saw the word cat, knowing that that says C A T doesn’t mean anything to me when I’m trying to read.
I need to know that that says C A T. C-AT, cat. And then when I read the word, I have to know in my mind what a cat is. So if I haven’t had a lot of experience with vocabulary, with real experiences in my world, being given descriptive language, knowing that that says cat means absolutely nothing to me because I don’t know what a cat is.
Right. Yeah. That’s a great example. so, you know, I would just say to anyone listening, if you are, worried about sight words before the age of, four, because someone is talking to you about how your child should be able to read these sight words. I would just say, maybe you could just not worry about it quite so much, huh? The best sight word for any child is their name and being able to find your name on the wall or in a book or wherever names are written, that’s everyone’s favorite word, their favorite first word. And actually the letters that they will learn first would be the letters in their name.
And so, as we are, talking about this emergent literacy with what parents can do to help support emergent literacy. What about writing? You know, we see a lot of coloring pages and that kind of thing in a lot of schools for very young children. what can you tell us about the development of writing and how parents could support that?
Yeah, especially when we think about that development from 0 to 3, children are in this stage of play where they’re mimicking a lot of times what they see adults doing. so if our children never see us right, They’re not going to understand the importance of symbols on a page having meaning, that they’re just not squiggly lines all together, that when we think of something, we can write it down because that has meaning to us. so even just the simple act of you verbalizing your grocery list while you’re handwriting it, while your two year old is watching, is the understanding that writing has meaning. A lot of times it’s easy for us to put things Just text it on our phone really quick. Make a checklist on our phone. but the child actually seeing us writing is shaping their understanding of what writing is.
Right. It’s tough because we do use our phones for everything, you know, like for grocery lists and phone numbers and all of those kinds of things. So like, what do you write in your life, Gabby? How do you use writing just in the everyday?
It’s a good question because even when we’re at the lab or when I’m doing stuff at school, all of our documentation now is through typing. And so when I go to a conference or when I go to professional development, I always make sure I bring my pen and my paper so I can actually write it out.
Maria Montessori once said that what the hand does, the mind remembers. So when I really need to remember something, I try to use my hand to write it out,
Right. That’s how I, if I’m going to have to learn anything, I have to write it with my hand and then say it out loud. And then as, you know, just over and over and over in order to actually remember anything. So I guess that just needs to become an intentional thing, you know, for parents to do is to make sure that they are maybe writing out their grocery list or writing out notes to themselves or writing even notes to their kids and putting them around.
This week we are feeding the neighbor’s dog down the street and I’m so afraid that we’re going to forget to go feed those dogs because you know I have to walk down to the end of the street in the morning and in the evening and it’s just not part of my routine. And so I’ve got these all these post it notes all over the house that say dog on it, so I can remember to go do that. But that’s t one example of a written note that’s in the everyday so storytelling and you know, language and oral language and that kind of thing, giving your children the opportunity to, what about just giving them pens and paper and, and having exposure to print? What do you say about that?
Yeah, environmental print is another great way we support those literacy skills just by where things are labeled in your environment, like a stop sign or a street sign.
And giving your children art materials is another way that we’re supporting that development of writing and those emergent writing skills. Because at first, when infants and toddlers start to use Art utensils like markers or crayons or pencils, they’re doing the cause and effect, right? When I put this on a paper, it, I see the line show up, what happens when I do big circles? But then starting around two and a half, going towards three, they start to draw something and bring it to you and tell you about their drawing, which is then beginning to take those mental images or mental thoughts they’re having and start to put it on paper, which even though they’re drawing something, it still is, supporting those emergent literacy skills.
Opportunities for your child to have free expression with art is important too.
Yeah, that’s a real important switch, isn’t it? When you go just from random scribbles to scribbles that actually represent something that you’re thinking about. And, yeah, that’s, that’s really cool. And, you know, just as a little aside for the next stages of scribbling or writing for very young children, is those scribbles begin to take some form in the shape of letters eventually and that happens around age three and a half to four.
And then by four, they’re probably able to begin to shape the letters of their name and maybe some other letters of names that are people important to them so that is how this little system goes so that when you enter into kindergarten, you’re ready to take those letters and begin to form them into words and put all of those things together to learn to read eventually, sometimes that doesn’t happen until first grade, middle of first grade, but it will happen, especially with all of this rich exposure in these early years.
So I have a video it’s entitled, How to Read a Book to Your Baby, and it’s in YouTube under the Nurtured Noggins channel, and I’m going to put a link to that in the show notes just to, give you a little bit extra information about reading to your child and then how to take that same story and then tell it as a story and relate it to maybe some things that you do in your everyday life.
So Gabby, what is your favorite tip? What would be the one thing that you would tell parents that they can do to support this emergent literacy in their very young child?
This is going to Maybe not be the tip people are looking for, but talking to your child intentionally is an amazing way to support literacy skills. And when I’m talking intentionally, really using descriptive language, being precise with your language is building that vocabulary, which is really important for them to be successful readers later. also taking opportunities to be It’s silly when you’re talking to your child, playing around with rhyming words and the sing song-y-ness of just having those conversations, is really all that your young child needs.
Yeah, that’s so great. Okay, well, thank you so much. I hope that this is really helpful in helping you relax a little bit about feeling like you have to do all of these things before your child goes to school to begin their school career in kindergarten. Really, the things that you need to be doing are the things that probably you’re doing all the time.
Which is talking to your child, but this just kind of gives you some ideas on how to be a little bit more intentional about it so that you are giving them even more of what they need to be successful.
Gabby, thank you so much for joining me for this conversation.
And thank you all for joining me on the podcast of Parenting in the First Three Years. We will see you next time.
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It’s a quiet, simple way that I can connect with you and your family and support you in your parenting journey.