Tutor profile: Amy W.

What are pre-reading skills and how do library story times develop these skills.

Children need to develop multiple literacy skills before they are actually ready to read. These are called pre-reading skills. The best thing you can do for children of any age is read aloud to them. Library story times are a wonderful chance to offer a read aloud opportunity to parents and their young children and also model ways parents can help their children develop pre-reading skills at home. Children as young as newborns love to be read to and reading aloud daily to children helps them develop what is called print motivation, or being interested in and enjoying books. Reading aloud also helps develop print awareness, which is how a child knows how to handle a book and notice and follow words on the page. Children need to develop letter knowledge, or how to recognize letters and their sounds and vocabulary, which is basically knowing the names of things. Children who are consistently read to have a much larger vocabulary than children who aren't. They also need to develop narrative skills, or the ability to tell and retell a story. Librarians can model this by retelling a story in different ways, for example, first as a book, then as a flannel board story or rhyme. Finally, they need to develop phonological awareness or the knowledge that words are comprised of a combination of sounds. This skill is developed by encouraging children to play with language by practicing rhyming, identifying the first sound of a word and breaking a word down into sounds. Reading books with rich rhyming text and presenting rhyming fingerplays are excellent ways to develop phonological awareness.

What was the second wave of feminism and how did it come about?

The second wave of feminism emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Also know as the Women's Liberation Movement, it had it's birth in the other major political movements of the era, specifically, the civil right and anti-war movements. Through the course of their activism in these movements, women began to evaluate the discrimination they experienced daily as women, both in the larger world and in their activist communities. They were some of the first activists to recognize the intersectionality of oppression.

What are pre-reading skills and how do toddlers and preschoolers develop them?

Children need to develop multiple literacy skills before they are actually ready to read. These are called pre-reading skills. The best thing you can do for children of all ages is read aloud to them. Children as young as newborns love to be read to and reading aloud daily to children helps them develop what is called print motivation, or being interested in and enjoying books. Reading aloud also helps develop print awareness, which is how a child knows how to handle a book and notice and follow words on the page. Children need to develop letter knowledge, or how to recognize letters and their sounds and vocabulary, which is basically knowing the names of things. Children who are consistently read to have a much larger vocabulary than children who aren't. They also need to develop narrative skills, or the ability to tell and retell a story. Finally, they need to develop phonological awareness or the knowledge that words are comprised of a combination of sounds. This skill is developed by encouraging children to play with language by practicing rhyming, identifying the first sound of a word and breaking a word down into sounds.