Language Experience...another tool for learning

Each week we have a language experience for the preschoolers.  The goal of this experience is to provide a fun & meaningful activity that will help our students to gain an understanding of the vocabulary from our theme.  Additionally, the language experience gives us an opportunity to see what the students have already learned and give them a chance to practice talking about it.  Lastly, these activities provide a time for our preschoolers to put their listening skills to work.

We use a team approach when implementing our language experiences.  One of the speech/language pathologists & myself, a teacher of the deaf, work together to prepare a learning activity that will raise the bar for our students' listening & language goals.  These structured language activities also expose the preschoolers to real opportunities that are highly motivating for using language in a purposeful manner.

After the experience is over, our goal is that the preschoolers will have had a real experience in class that will help them to further synthesize their vocabulary knowledge on a certain topic.  Hopefully, they will be so excited about it that they will want to share what they have learned with someone at home.

For the first month of school, we focused our language experiences on our 2 themes:  About Me & the Pet Shop.  We made apple smiles, a mouse face, a Pete the Cat snack and a hamster snack.  While these particular language experiences used food items as our learning medium, we do not always use food for our language experiences.