Lotte Henrichs

Kindergarten Talk about Science and Technology

In their daily lives, young children encounter numerous phenomena that are part of scientific domains, such as mathematics, physics and biology. By nature, children are curious and motivated to learn about the world and have strong intuitions about the nature of the phenomena they encounter. From infancy, children form visuo-spatial and sensorimotor representations of their personal experiences, and create mental ‘scripts’ or ‘models’ that include information about the temporal and causal structure of actions and events, its obligatory and optional components, and the associated roles (French, 2004; Nelson & et. al, 1986).

Lexical features of parental academic language input: the effect on vocabulary growth in monolingual Dutch children

The importance of a rich vocabulary for successful literacy development of children has been well established over the past decades. It has been shown in several studies that children’s vocabulary knowledge is of great value in predicting eventual school success (Biemiller and Boote, 2003; Bornstein, 1998; Bornstein, Haynes and Painter, 1998; Cunningham and Stanovich, 1997; Tymms, Merrell and Henderson, 1997). Most likely, the relationship between vocabulary and school success is mediated by children’s reading proficiency. Several studies have shown that inadequate vocabulary knowledge hinders reading comprehension from the very beginning of literacy development in elementary school (cf. Biemiller and Boote, 2003). Since reading is a major skill in every school subject, insufficient reading comprehension skills in turn will cause problems in numerous fields of the elementary school curriculum.