Learning to read begins at home through everyday parent-child interactions, long before children attend school. Parents' continuing support of literacy development throughout elementary school positively affects their children's reading ability. Many recent efforts to motivate parents to be involved in their child's literacy development involve…

The goal of the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) Practice Guide, "Foundational Skills to Support Reading for Understanding in Kindergarten through 3rd Grade," is to offer educators specific, evidence-based recommendations for teaching foundational reading skills to students in kindergarten through 3rd grade. The guide suggests…

The goal of the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) Practice Guide, "Foundational Skills to Support Reading for Understanding in Kindergarten through 3rd Grade," is to offer educators specific, evidence-based recommendations for teaching foundational reading skills to students in kindergarten through 3rd grade. The guide suggests…

The goal of this practice guide is to offer educators specific, evidence-based recommendations for teaching foundational reading skills to students in kindergarten through 3rd grade. This guide is a companion to the existing practice guide, "Improving Reading Comprehension in Kindergarten Through 3rd Grade", and as a set, these guides…

Boom! Br-r-ring! Cluck! Moo!--exciting sounds are everywhere. Whether visiting online sites that play sounds or taking a "sound hike," ask your students to notice the sounds they hear, then write their own book, using sound words, based on Dr. Seuss's "Mr. Brown Can MOO! Can You?" During the three 45-minute sessions, grade K-2…

A group of 30 nonreading kindergarten children who received 7 weeks of instruction in phoneme segmentation and letter names/sounds were assessed on segmentation and reading measures. They outperformed a language activities group, which received instruction in letter names/sounds and additional language activities, and a group receiving no…

This lesson plan invites primary students to share their letter/sound knowledge in a small group and gives teachers an opportunity to assess knowledge in a meaningful context. Working with name cards, students share observations about their names and the names of their classmates. Extensions are appropriate for a range of primary-aged students.…

Current research increasingly highlights the role of early literacy in young children's development--and informs practices and policies that promote success among diverse learners. This handbook presents cutting-edge knowledge on all aspects of literacy learning in the early years. Volume 2 provides additional perspectives on important topics…

This article reviews research on training phonological awareness in kindergarten and first grade children and describes research-based intervention and assessment activities applicable to classroom and clinical settings. Intervention applications described include categorization activities, phoneme segmentation, and metalinguistic games. (DB)

Use storybook reading to build the early literacy competencies that preschool, kindergarten, and first-grade students need to become successful readers and learners. This essential research-based guide provides strategies and sample interactions that will help teachers to strengthen children's knowledge of written language, vocabulary, phonology,…

In order to help kindergartners and first graders who need extra work on their literacy skills, this book offers a plan for teaching phonemic awareness and letter sound correspondence. The plan in the book is a developmentally sequenced, 11-week program to give students repeated opportunities to practice and enhance their beginning reading and…

Reports on a study of the relationship of both phonemic and musical sound discrimination to reading ability among 18 British first graders. Finds that discrimination of musical sounds is related to music performance but that the influential factor is a specific awareness of pitch changes. (CFR)

Describes how primary teachers can use decoding strategies within a literature-based, whole-language setting. A three-stage approach involves the book stage (real reading), the word stage (learning words), and the letter-sound stage (learning sounds). The article provides sample activities. (SM)

Intended to discourage classroom reading teachers from relying on "phonics instruction" as a remedy for students' inadequate reading performance, this pamphlet presents reasons why phonics drills should not be taught at all in the classroom and offers a set of practical phonic awareness activities to help poor readers overcome reading…

Designed to add to the existing knowledge base concerning the saliency of features used by children to identify isolated words, a study examined whether the method of instruction influences the extent to which various features are used for word identification and recall. Subjects, 117 kindergarten students from a suburban Buffalo, New York, school…