Small Kids, Big Words

Morning meeting begins with—no surprise—the weather. But when preschool teacher Radha Hernandez describes the drenching winter downpour, she doesn’t reach for a rainy day symbol to stick on a calendar. She reaches for words.

“I was curled up under the covers. I was cozy, toasty warm and outside I heard an am-a-a-a-zing thing,” says Hernandez, a founding teacher at Lee Academy, a pilot school in Boston serving children from age three to third grade. “Thunder! Thunder! I heard thunder outside my window. It was a loud, crashing, booming sound.”

The ten children clustered in a horseshoe on the rug (two others will arrive later) perk up. Timmy insists he didn’t hear it. No one believes him, but he stands his verbal ground. “I didn’t want to hear it and so that is why I didn’t listen,” he says.

Molly, who’s four, adds, “I guess he was ignoring it.”

It is, of course, always cute when small kids use big words. But a growing body of research and classroom practice show that building a sophisticated vocabulary at an early age is also key to raising reading success—and narrowing the achievement gap. At schools like Lee Academy, teachers are overcoming the age-old habit of speaking to young children in simplified language and instead deliberately weaving higher-level word choices into preschool and primary grade classrooms. Whether it’s a discussion at morning meeting, informal talk at the block area, or a selection of read-aloud books, teachers are exposing younger children to language that, in many cases, exceeds the vocabulary level of a typical conversation between college graduates.

This is an excerpt from the Harvard Education Letter. Subscribers can click here to continue reading this article. Click here to become a subscriber.