Books as the Starting Point

Why we believe books should be the foundation for your bilingual teaching-learning strategy

This is an opinion piece based on the author’s professional and personal beliefs about the pivotal role that books, and stories play to support your biliteracy strategy in school or at home. Some links are affiliate links.

The short answer is this: books and stories are spring-boards for structured and unstructured conversation. They open windows and doors that lead to many paths toward activation or development of background knowledge.

Books and stories give you as a parent or teacher a starting point, a way forward. In this brief post I will let you know how to use the books you have and the stories you can share with your children as:

1. A way to bring their attention and interest to a variety of subjects.
2. A Rosetta stone for second language exploration, practice, and development.

Supported by the school curriculum and core standards, or empowered by the tool of a homeschooling curriculum, topics of conversation and exploration are made available to the guiding adult, teacher, or parent.

However, even with those guides in our hands, we must find a way to spark in our students and children the interest to learn, explore, dive deeper and talk about the subjects and milestones laid down for us.

The Essence of the Literacy-Based Approach

One way to do this, and the way we are advocating for at TLB for Literacy and Education, is through the use of books, texts of all kind, and written and oral stories. This is called literacy-based education in the school setting, and literacy-based intervention in the speech and language therapy setting.

What this means is that a book or story is at the core of the experience. The book or story opens the subject and guides the exploration, allowing us to activate previous or background knowledge. It’s the source of inspiration.

I believe there’s no limit to what books and stories can help us to explore. There’s just so many to choose from, starting with the most important story a child could ever hear and know, their own.

For the purpose of giving you a concrete example, let’s pick an Operations and Algebraic Thinking Common Core Standard for First grade Math. And let’s start the introduction and exploration with a book.

As an added element of our strategy, I’ll be implementing a holistic biliteracy approach, thinking about my hypothetical students as emergent bilinguals.

Using a book to introduce a mathematical concept and skill

Book: Five Little Ducks / Cinco patitos

CCS: Relate counting to addition and subtraction (learning and implementing the “counting on” technique).

Mini Lesson: Understand the terms “bigger number” and “smaller number”.

First

We’ll introduce the basic concepts and vocabulary for the lesson and Unit:

Numbers/números, big/grande, small/pequeño, bigger/más grande, smaller/más pequeño, count/contar, addition/suma, subtraction/resta.

It’s a great idea to have visual aids. These will help clarify concepts, make cross-language connections, visually present the new and known vocabulary, and be a point of reference to the children/students and their guiding adult/teacher.

At this stage we are activating the oracy component of our holistic biliteracy approach, by engaging them in conversation about the subject.

Second

We’ll introduce the book/story, and point out explicitly the concepts and vocabulary that we are exploring, and where it can be found in the story:

“This is the story about five little ducks, cinco patitos. In the story we’ll be counting numbers from one to five.”

Again, using a visual aid, we can have the numbers one to five displayed on a whiteboard or a flip board, and a few combinations of numbers in pairs, one bigger and one smaller. We could then ask a few more questions:

“By looking at the numbers on the board, who can tell me which are the smaller numbers in each pair, who can tell me which are the bigger numbers in each pair?”

When introducing a basic concept to a group of children or students at any grade level is a good idea to use a KWL chart, to activate previous knowledge. (Know – Wonder – Learned)

This type of chart allows for informal assessment by the parent/teacher, and it gives children/students an opportunity to reflect on what they already know, and see learning as a process of discovery.

Encourage children/students to complete their KWL charts using all languages/dialects or linguistic references at their disposal.

The oracy component continuous with the open dialog and questions. The writing component is added with the use of the KWL chart.

To complete their charts children could also use pictorial references. This encourages creativity, problem-solving, and flexible thinking; skills that activate the metalanguage component.

Third

Let’s read the book! If we have enough copies for all children/students we could practice shared reading or collaborative reading.

Five Little Ducks / Cinco patitos is a story with a song, so we could alternate between starting the lessons for the Unit by reading or singing together.

“Cinco patitos” will provide the theme for the Unit and the lessons around counting, addition, subtraction, and the “counting on technique.”

Every element of the Unit and its individual lessons will carry this theme:

We’ll use “patitos” for our visuals, we’ll count them, color them, make them find their way home in sequence (from smallest number to biggest, and vice versa), we’ll use “patitos” as we solve word problems, etc.

With this we’ll be activating the reading component, along with oracy and metalanguage, as we model reading and encourage children to reflect on the story, integrating the key vocabulary for our lesson and Unit.

Final Thoughts:

You could use the same book and song for the remainder of the Unit, or bring in other books, stories or songs with the same theme or characters. You could also write your own, or come up with a story together as a group.

You could bring physical props to use as you read or work on word problems and other small challenges. (These can be easily found or made).

Each child/student could have/make their own “patito”, and you could plan the modeling of addition and subtraction as a kinetic activity.

PS: The extensive use of books, texts and stories should not be limited to a certain grade level or reading/language proficiency. All children/students can benefit from this teaching-learning strategy.

Now, I would like to know:

How would you use Five Little Ducks / Cinco patitos at home or in your classroom? How would you integrate this book/story/song as part of your lessons, and for which subject?

Give it a try! and share your own ideas with me in a comment below.