Page 94 - Reading Nest - The Supportive Literacy Environment Handbook

Facilitating children’s linguistic skills

The teacher should, first and foremost, be a good listener, speaker, reader and writer, thus
setting an example, support speech development with a variety of devices – rewording,

mimicking, body language, pictures, items, etc. The teacher should monitor children's

responses to speech, including both verbal and non-verbal ones (e.g. looking aside, or
fidgeting, and create as many possibilities for all children for content-rich speaking,

including the slower thinkers and the ones with a mother tongue other than Estonian.

The teacher should give full support to the development of written language from the

beginning. For children the focus, though, is on what can be done with this (e.g. learn,
write up information), the teacher always clearly presents the language side – starts with

words, which are simpler to read and write to allow a feeling of success.

• In the reading nest as in the rest of the room illustrations can be added to texts. The

daily schedule can be written up in many ways. First, children look at the picture
and ‘read’ – this is when we sing, or eat or go to bed, yet soon enough they develop

an understanding of the text separately.

• Teachers can choose books with repeating text for the nest, so that the beginner
reader could guess what comes next, for instance in Little Red Riding Hood there

is the question “But granny. What big ...” . . and only the last word must be

carefully read. The wolf then always says “All the better to .... .” And again, only
the verb changes.