The aim of the research reported here was to investigate why a percentage of students experience continued difficulty in literacy learning while participating in Reading Recovery. It was hypothesized that this is to do with particular aspects of teacher-learner interactions. Accordingly the study used ethnographic methodology to describe…

"Phonological Awareness Training" is a general practice aimed at enhancing young children's phonological awareness abilities. Phonological awareness refers to the ability to detect or manipulate the sounds in words independent of meaning. Phonological awareness is a precursor to reading. "Phonological Awareness Training" can…

This exciting guide provides professionals with a balanced emergent literacy program that develops language, print awareness, and phonological awareness skills. Activities in these three domains are integrated into 10 lessons. Each "PreRead" session begins with a written and oral presentation of the sequence of activities for that day using a…

Letter sound knowledge, which, together with phonological awareness, is highly predictive of pre-school children's reading acquisition, derives from children's knowledge of their associated letter names and the phonological patterns of those names. In this study of 66 monolingual pre-school children we examined whether phonological patterns…

To understand difficulties in early literacy most research has focused on print related knowledge. Knowing about print, however, is only one aspect of reading and may neglect how successful early readers also develop capacities to enter the text world and make sense of it through a personal, relational experience. To explore this other aspect of…

The predictive validity of early literacy skills of children among preschool is relatively unknown. The purpose of this longitudinal study was to provide this examination. From a sample of preschoolers, longitudinal data were available for 143 of the children in kindergarten and for 116 of them through the end of first grade. Preschool children…

"Ready, Set, Leap!"[R] is a preschool curriculum that focuses on early reading skills, such as phonemic awareness, letter knowledge, and letter-sound correspondence, using multisensory technology that incorporates touch, sight, and sound. Teachers may adopt either a theme-based or a literature-based teaching approach, and for each…

The "Voyager Universal Literacy System"[R] is a core reading program designed to help students learn to read at or above grade level by the end of the third grade. This program uses strategies such as individual reading instruction, higher-level comprehension activities, problem solving, and writing. Students are also exposed to…

The course of language acquisition from infancy to public primary school was followed in a sample of 56 Finnish children to examine precursors to reading at first grade. Structural equation modeling of continuity suggested effects from growth in early vocabulary to mastery of inflectional forms at preschool age. The early language directly…

This article discusses the inclusion of movement education and motor activities of a kindergarten teacher in her class. She was becoming increasingly annoyed with the intense focus on academics at the expense of other important parts of her program. According to her, the children need exercise, and social skills, and music, and being outdoors.…

This paper reports a study exploring the associations between measures of two levels of phonological representation: recognition (epi-linguistic) and production (meta-linguistic) tasks, and very early reading and writing skills. Thirty-eight pre-reading Ottawa-area children, aged 4-5 years, named environmental print (EP), wrote their own name,…

This is an investigation into the accelerated acquisition of English among young ESL learners in an International School. It employed an ethnographic case study approach where data were gathered through non-participant observations, unstructured interviews, relevant documents, students' portfolios, field notes and biographical details. The sample…

"The Critical Word Factor," based on word recognition demands of texts, is a measure of text difficulty designed specifically for texts used by beginning readers. The measure is a function of the number of new, unique words per 100 running words of text that fall outside a designated curriculum. The authors investigated the validity of the…

Prekindergarten programs are expanding rapidly but evidence on their effects is limited. Using rich data from Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, we estimate the effects of prekindergarten on children's school readiness. We find that prekindergarten is associated with higher reading and mathematics skills at school entry, but also higher levels of…

In this article, the author examines the effectiveness of reflective teaching in Kindergarten which promotes children's learning. Reflective teaching encourages kindergartners to extend their thinking by asking questions and by modeling their own use of reflection. Further, he emphasizes that it is possible for teachers to nurture reflective…