November 3, 2023
by Mary Pat
Comments Off on Does Your Classroom Feature These 8 Components Of A Positive Classroom Climate for Multilingual Children?

Does Your Classroom Feature These 8 Components Of A Positive Classroom Climate for Multilingual Children?

Last post in this series on how to support multilingual children in settings from day care to preschool to school! This time we are off to Spain where Khalfaoui and colleagues looked at 14 studies to get a handle on what … Continue reading

November 3, 2023
by Mary Pat
Comments Off on 5 Ways To Support Multilingual Children To Develop The School Language

5 Ways To Support Multilingual Children To Develop The School Language

Langaloo and colleagues in Holland looked at 31 studies of teacher-child interaction with multilingual children and how they compare with teacher-child interactions with monolingual children. Essentially, they conclude that where children have low skill levels in the school language, teachers … Continue reading

November 3, 2023
by Mary Pat
Comments Off on How to support multilingual children in day care

How to support multilingual children in day care

In day-care settings, De Houwer and Pascal (2021) recommend that educators actively value all of the home languages. This doesn’t mean you have to know all of the languages or teach these languages in the day care setting. It does … Continue reading

November 3, 2023
by Mary Pat
Comments Off on 4 Ways to More Culturally Sensitive Early Childhood Education

4 Ways to More Culturally Sensitive Early Childhood Education

You know that expression : if you can’t see it, you can’t be it?  I think it’s worth thinking about that in relation to our speech and language therapy clinics and in education settings too. I’ve been reading some studies looking … Continue reading

April 30, 2022
by Mary Pat
Comments Off on What’s the story with stuttering & bilingual children?

What’s the story with stuttering & bilingual children?

  Key words about the research on this topic? Ambiguous, conflicting, sparse! I’ve read two systematic reviews that aimed to pull together several studies on the topic & I picked key points from both to keep things simple. First up is … Continue reading

October 15, 2021
by Mary Pat
Comments Off on 6 things to do when your child’s reading just doesn’t seem to be improving

6 things to do when your child’s reading just doesn’t seem to be improving

Welcome to the third post in the five part series about reading and writing in children, put together for you by myself and my friend and colleague Phyllis Jordan who works specifically with children who struggle with reading. In the … Continue reading

September 10, 2021
by Mary Pat
Comments Off on Eight things to do when you’re worried that your child is struggling to read

Eight things to do when you’re worried that your child is struggling to read

And we’re back! Phyllis Jordan, my speech and language therapy colleague and friend have 8 tips for you if you’re worried about your child learning to read. In our first post, we shared 14 ways for helping your child learn … Continue reading

August 26, 2021
by Mary Pat
Comments Off on 14 Ways To Help Your Child Learn To Read

14 Ways To Help Your Child Learn To Read

It’s that time of year again when school starts and we stumble through the first few days of getting back into a routine. Do you remember learning to read? I have a vague recollection of books about a boy and … Continue reading

April 21, 2021
by Mary Pat
Comments Off on Learning to Read and Write in Two Or More Languages

Learning to Read and Write in Two Or More Languages

This is a massive topic! There’s so much debate about methods and strategies and timing for learning to read and write. I’m not going to try and cover everything in this post or we’d be here forever! I’m just going … Continue reading