cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/30126921
By Marc Tracy
May 14, 2025"In March, for instance, Accurso posted a video of two children watching a Ms. Rachel video amid rubble. The caption read: “My friends Celine and Silia in what used to be their home in Gaza. They deserve to live in a warm, safe home again.”
On Monday, Accurso posted to her Instagram account photos of a meeting she said she had last week with Rahaf, a 3-year-old girl from Gaza who lost her legs in an airstrike, and the child’s mother. The meeting was arranged through the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund."
There are people in Gaza who speak English and want their kids to learn it. Also, subtitles or closed captions is a good first step in teaching toddlers to read.
Yes to the English. But toddlers can’t read yet, so subtitles won’t be useful unless an adult is also reading or explaining them — just watching TV, even with subtitles, is not enough for language development in toddlers.
As in the image, the parents are right there, kids on their laps in the rubble. And for wee toddlers, it’s not that anyone expects them to read all or any of the words in the dialogue. It’s making the initial connection between the spoken (or sung) words and those groups of letters on the screen. A little further along it’s associating the sounds of the letters rather than just their names.
And then they’ll start to recognize the basic sight words, even when they’re not phonetic. Similar to reading a book along with a preschooler and having them do all the "the"s as you point to them.