Durham schools bridging vocabulary gap
They may not speak much. They’ll shrug to answer a question.
If you ask them to make a story from three pictures — a snowball, a bigger snowball and a carrot nose — they may respond simply, “Snow, more snow, carrot.” And at the age of 4, they may not understand prepositions like “between” and “beside.”
For kindergarten students living in poverty, who tend to have heard only onethird as many words at home as classmates from more educated, wealthy families, schools must help build their oral vocabulary before they tackle the ABC’s, said principal Sue Simeson of Clara Hughes Public School in Oshawa.
It’s one of 12 high-needs schools in the Durham school board’s Make a Difference pilot project to counter pitfalls of poverty.
“Our kids aren’t as experienced with books as kids in some other schools are, and about 30 per cent are not where you want them to be with oral skills,” Simeson said.
Speech pathologist Nancy Sarlo warns that weak language skills in kindergarten, if unchanged, can lead to weak literacy skills in the higher grades and ultimately high dropout rates, mental health issues and even higher chances of incarceration.
So the pilot project gave two schools, Dr. C.F. Cannon and Glen St. Public School, a speech and language pathologist for a half-day a week over several months to share the trade secrets of oral language.
These secrets include vocabulary, storytelling, producing sounds, “social language” and an awareness of what letters make which sounds, said Anila Punnoose, Durham’s chief speech and language pathologist.
“We have teachers ask more openended ‘wh’ questions (who, what, where, when, why) because you want to make sure our kids are all on the same playing field.”
At Clara Hughes Public School, in another high-needs neighbourhood, kindergarten teacher Jennifer Hill and early childhood educator Diane Hollywood model proper, grammatically correct sentences out loud all day long across the classroom: “Hey, Mrs. Hollywood! I was thinking if we tried to build a tower with those wooden blocks, we should put the big blocks on the bottom . . . ”
Said Hill: “People aren’t born with vocabulary. We learn it day by day.”
If kids haven’t learned it at home, school can bridge that gap.
It’s the same can-do attitude expressed by Simeson, who, like all her staff, works each week with a small group of struggling young readers to help build their skills and confidence.
“We know some of our children live in abject poverty, so how do we meet their needs? We hand-picked staff with a passion for working with highrisk students, and we set high expectations. There’s no reason they can’t do as well as students at any school in the board.”