"Ladders to Literacy" is a supplemental early literacy curriculum published in "Ladders to Literacy: A Kindergarten Activity Book." The program targets children at different levels and from diverse cultural backgrounds: those who are typically developing, have disabilities, or are at risk of reading failure. The activities are…

Parents are their children's first and foremost important teachers. This paper presents some ways parents can help their children "get ready to read" during the ages of 2, 3, 4 and 5. This paper also offers several checklists for parents of kindergartners, first graders, second graders, and third graders.

The development of phonological awareness (PA) before school age was modeled in association with the development of vocabulary and letter knowledge, home literacy environment (HLE), children's reading interest, and beginning reading skill in children with and without familial risk of dyslexia. A total of 186 children were followed from birth to…

Prereading and early reading skills of preschool twin children in Australia, Scandinavia and the United States were explored in a genetically sensitive design (max. N=627 preschool pairs and 422 kindergarten pairs). Analyses indicated a strong genetic influence on preschool phonological awareness, rapid naming and verbal memory. Print awareness,…

Purpose: This study simultaneously examined predictors of phonological awareness within the framework of 2 theories: the phonological distinctness hypothesis and the lexical restructuring model. Additionally, age as a moderator of the relations between predictor variables and phonological awareness was examined. Method: This cross-sectional…

This article features the Project of Excellence, a program that was designed to engage families in an interactive community-based school literacy program. The authors discuss how they created the Project of Excellence. Although the goal of the Project was to improve the reading skills of young children, the focus of the Project was directed toward…

It has been suggested that the differences observed for dyslexic readers compared to normal readers on tasks measuring visual sensitivity may simply be the result of differences between the two groups in general cognitive ability and/or attentional engagement. One common way to accommodate this proposal is to match normal and dyslexic readers on…

The purpose of this study was to explore vocabulary acquisition of primary grade children. Specifically, the study used a unique teaching strategy that added physical movement to typical read-aloud sessions with kindergarten and first grade children. Although a review of reading research revealed a plethora of studies, very few studies…

Even before they are able to read, young children possess many skills that can help pave the way for literacy. For example, preschoolers have sizable spoken vocabularies and often know that English words are read from left to right. The focus of this article is on another type of knowledge that many preschoolers possess--knowledge of the names of…

Readers theater is a familiar literacy strategy for children who can read independently; however, it can also be used with younger children who have not yet developed independent reading skills. The purpose of this article is to adapt the concept of readers theater for use with emergent readers. It focuses first on defining readers theater and…

"DaisyQuest" is a software bundle that offers computer-assisted instruction in phonological awareness, targeting children aged three to seven years (or preschool to second grade). The instructional activities, framed in a fairy tale involving a search for a friendly dragon named Daisy, teach children how to recognize words that rhyme;…

The researchers addressed two questions: (1) Does maternal reading mediation and family home literacy environment (HLE) relate to children's emergent literacy (EL) level? and (2) Do the relationships among these variables differ as a function of socioeconomic strata (SES) level. A total of 94 5-6-year-old children, 47 from low SES (LSES) and 47…

To determine the attitudes of teachers of students who are visually impaired or blind about the use of contracted or uncontracted Braille for emergent readers, the author posted a questionnaire on three electronic listservs from October through December 2002 and received responses from 40 teachers in India, Canada, the West Indies, and the United…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between the types of speech errors that are produced by children with speech-sound disorders and the children's phonological awareness skills during their prekindergarten and kindergarten years. Method: Fifty-eight children with speech-sound disorders were assessed during the…

The study explores the relationship between phonological awareness and early reading for bilingual children learning to read in two languages that use different writing systems. Participants were 57 Cantonese-English bilingual 6-year-olds who were learning to read in both languages. The children completed cognitive measures, phonological awareness…