The Importance of Teacher-Student Conversations in Early Literacy

Abstract

My Father, who when I was of preschool age, always awoke to drive me to Story Hour at the Chicago Lawn local branch library after working all night, and who understood "Word Power" which-until he died in 1984-read faithfully in the Reader's Digest. He attempted to add a new word a week to his second-language vocabulary by learning the word and its definition in that section of the publication. My siblings and I observed that a new word that he was able to use successfully in conversation remained in his vocabulary. The words that did not work well in his usage, we never heard again. It strikes me that perhaps this might be the reason why the students at the Turner House Preschool at Juniper Gardens in Kansas City, Kansas