From Clouds to a Pot of Gold and ROY G BIV: A Metaphor For the Relation Between Language Development and Literacy Development
School-age children need to have mastered the basic building blocks of language before they can slide on the rainbow to the pot of gold, which is mastering literacy skills. The basic building blocks of language are the clouds and rain. In clinical heuristic words, school-age children must be producing multi-word utterances, have acquired the fourteen grammatical morphemes, and have a semantic lexicon of 300-350 words expressively. A typically developing child should reach these heuristics by the age of three. Continued language development will be the colors of the rainbow ROY G BIV* that children will follow to the pot of gold waiting for them. The shiny pot of gold is filled with literacy skills. The ROY colors of the rainbow include the development of skills to express passive verb voice, anaphora, negotiation and use conjunctions. Extended discourse give the rainbow the BIV colors. Children learn from narrative stories. Literature traditions help children develop the skills to follow a story with linear structure and oral traditions can help define cultural and moral values. Children will also continue to master literacy skills through expository discourse, this is the scientific, fact-based content of literature. The color Green with a capital G is the metalinguistics, metasyntax, and metapragmatics binds the ROY and BIV together, and continue to develop throughout school-age years and beyond.
*ROY G BIV= an acronym for remembering the colors of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.
School-age children need to have mastered the basic building blocks of language before they can slide on the rainbow to the pot of gold, which is mastering literacy skills. The basic building blocks of language are the clouds and rain. In clinical heuristic words, school-age children must be producing multi-word utterances, have acquired the fourteen grammatical morphemes, and have a semantic lexicon of 300-350 words expressively. A typically developing child should reach these heuristics by the age of three. Continued language development will be the colors of the rainbow ROY G BIV* that children will follow to the pot of gold waiting for them. The shiny pot of gold is filled with literacy skills. The ROY colors of the rainbow include the development of skills to express passive verb voice, anaphora, negotiation and use conjunctions. Extended discourse give the rainbow the BIV colors. Children learn from narrative stories. Literature traditions help children develop the skills to follow a story with linear structure and oral traditions can help define cultural and moral values. Children will also continue to master literacy skills through expository discourse, this is the scientific, fact-based content of literature. The color Green with a capital G is the metalinguistics, metasyntax, and metapragmatics binds the ROY and BIV together, and continue to develop throughout school-age years and beyond.
*ROY G BIV= an acronym for remembering the colors of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.