Gurupriya Ramanathan

Literacy Research Association (LRA) Annual Conference, Atlanta, GA

The Roundtable presentation describes a research project that is currently in progress at the Department of Early and Elementary Education. The project investigates the impact of maker education on pre-service teacher instruction when infused into an early literacy methods course (ELED 330: Integrated Language Arts, grades 3-6). We are currently investigating pre-service teacher use of maker educational practices when working with students in an upper-level literacy course (ELED 410: Literacy Assessment and Intervention; taken the semester following ELED 330), which has a clinical component in the May Literacy Center (literacy clinic based on campus), and in their internship settings (in a local public-school classroom). Work on publishing final results in academic and practitioner journals is ongoing.

National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) Annual Conference , Nashville, TN

The presentation summarizes a research project studying the nature of social interactions that take place between preschool students with diverse social and emotional skills when engaging in engineering activities. While a variety of interventions have been designed to support preschool students with disabilities, they target foundational skills such as inviting peers to play and taking turns with materials, leaving a research gap on more complex social skills such as collaboration. Engineering encompasses hands-on activity, inquiry, and teamwork that develops a student’s collaboration and problem-solving skills. Given that preschool students with disabilities require further support in these skills, engineering activities provide naturally embedded opportunities for collaboration, and students’ engagement in engineering is a gap in the research that needs to be explored. In this study, four engineering activities were implemented over a four-week period. Analysis of video clips of student participation and teacher interviews revealed that students assigned responsibilities to each other and completed the activities in small groups, and other students who needed teacher support worked intermittently with peers. The importance of engineering activities in providing the platform for students with diverse needs to work together and engage in authentic peer interactions is discussed as was the implications of these findings and recommendations for practitioners.
This session will be helpful to two sets of audiences: a) audience members who have never used or implemented engineering in their classroom/profession: this session will break down and simplify engineering in preschool to the audience, especially its connection to social-emotional development and ways to connect engineering to their practice with young students; b) audience members who already design and implement engineering activities in their classrooms: this session will provide a toolkit of strategies to these audience members to take back to their classrooms and further implement.

State of Maryland Literacy Association Annual Conference, Virtual

The use of varied genres in early childhood may accelerate language development, encourage reading, prevent later literacy failure, and help close the opportunity gap. Additionally, it gives children a leg up learning essential concepts for science. Giving children opportunities to experience science phenomenon or participate in science investigations and then backing it up with informational texts that explain science concepts also helps break down science concepts for children and give them the language needed to describe observations, explain scientific phenomena, evaluate and communicate information, and make conclusions. Several studies indicate the dominance of narrative fiction may contribute to reading difficulties in school, especially as children start to read textbooks. This presentation begins with a review of literature suggesting that introducing children in early childhood to multiple genres may offer promising advantages for literacy development. The presentation also includes techniques for getting the most from the use of science texts, both at home and in the classroom. An example of a science investigation for young children, followed by examples of informational texts related to the investigation, and how to present these to children is described.