Language Development Part II: Realia

Dear Educator,

It's spring, and that means it must be almost time for the International Reading Association (IRA) conference, our biggest event of the year. We hope you can come see us and all our new products in Toronto this year, or perhaps at one of our other exhibits. We always enjoy meeting our customers, and getting the chance to hear about your needs and how you are using our materials in your classroom.

In last month's newsletter, we talked a bit about using realia (concrete objects) for language development. This month we are expanding on this increasingly popular topic. We hope you find these tips and links useful, and that you get some new ideas for using realia with your students.

Best wishes,

Rosalind Iiams, Editor
editor@primaryconcepts.com

Background: Many children in today's classrooms struggle with the English language. Some come from homes where a foreign language is spoken; others simply have not developed a large enough academic vocabulary to thrive in the classroom. In any case, many children are at risk because of their limited English vocabularies.

Realia—real objects or miniatures that resemble their real-world counterparts—provide a useful tool to help these children develop essential English vocabulary. Realia enhance meaning and make vocabulary more concrete and, therefore, more comprehensible.

Collecting Realia: You may wish to purchase a collection of minitaures for language development from Primary Concepts, or begin collecting your own. Good places to look are party stores, toy stores, craft supply stores, and fabric stores. Supplement the purchased items with objects you can find around the house, such as a rock or a stone, a piece of wood, a nail, a screw, a paper clip, a button, and snap, and so on. The best objects are realistic and three-dimensional, and they need to be safe for classroom use (i.e., no sharp edges). Try to collect a variety of objects from categories like animals, doll house furniture, dolls, foods, kitchen play sets, sports equipment, tools, toys, and vehicles.

Organizing Your Collection: Once you've gathered a collection of realia, you will want to organize the miniatures so you can quickly find the object you need. We find it best to keep the objects together in a Vocabulary Development Center, typically a storage compartment with drawers labeled by category.

Using Realia: One of the main ways to use your Vocabulary Development Center is to prepare language learners for regular lessons in which their language deficits may pose a problem. For example, if you are reading a book that involves sea creatures or you are working on a science unit involving sea life, have the children who need extra language support identify the related sea creatures from your Vocabulary Development Center before you begin your lesson. 

Check for prior knowledge before you start working with a category of objects, so you can build from those. Set out all the sea creatures, for example, and have the children take turns pointing to an object and telling you one thing about it.  Some children may be able to tell you the name of the object (e.g., "seal"); others may be able to impart some information about the object (e.g., "It swims"). Use the knowledge you gain from this activity to gear your language instruction to the needs of your class. It is best to work with groups of children whose language skills are at about the same level. The groups should be small (about 4-6 children) so that everyone will get plenty of talking time.

In addition to this ongoing use of the Vocabulary Development Center, you can also use realia with small groups of children to build specific language skills. Such activities invite children to build their oral language by listening and speaking. You can use realia to help children compare, describe, differentiate, and categorize. Children especially enjoy storytelling activities.

Source: Realia: Making Language Real, from Primary Concepts.

Use animal objects to teach ordinal numbers and prepositions in this engaging realia activity.

[Lesson taken from Realia: Making Language Real (Primary Concepts Product No. 3924).]

These 200 lifelike miniatures (realia) will help you build the vocabularies of English language learners and struggling native speakers alike. This huge collection of engaging objects is organized into 26 themes, for storage in the 26 labeled compartments of our Object Organizer. The accompanying guide, Realia: Making Language Real, provides dozens of language-rich activities to help you get the most out of this versatile resource.

The comprehensive resource guide shows you how to set up and manage your realia collection. The rich collection of activities will have your students naming the objects, describing them in detail, sorting them into categories, following directions, and telling stories. They will sort the objects using the four included Sorting Mats, and use the felt Story Mats you make using templates for Under the Sea, At the Pond, Bug Life, and other story scenes.

April specials, online only!

Realia: Making Language Real (3924) Regularly $14.95; Special $12.95

Vocabulary Development Center (3503) Regularly $159.00; Special $145.00

Do you have a favorite vocabulary activity that has worked with your students? Share it with us! Send your activity (electronic photos are great too) to editor@primaryconcepts.com. We’ll share selected activities in our next newsletter.

Readers' Theater is a wonderful vehicle for increasing fluency and sight-word recognition, and improving reading comprehension. Next month, we'll explore the benefits and implementation of this motivational strategy. You'll find lots of interesting links to informational articles and the latest research.

"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then - to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn."

– T.H. White, "The Once and Future King"