Selecting books for young children can not only be a fun and rewarding experience but also a little daunting, considering the number of books available. Frequent collaboration between an author and a public librarian has produced valuable insights about how to begin reading with very young children. Suggestions are offered for how parents and…

Accurate identification of at-risk kindergarten and 1st-grade students through early reading screening is an essential element of responsiveness to intervention models of reading instruction. The authors consider predictive validity and classification accuracy of early reading screening assessments with attention to sensitivity and specificity.…

In its simplest sense, readers theater is the presentation of written work in a dramatic format. The fundamental difference between readers theater and traditional theater is that performers read their lines. With readers theater there's no memorization, and usually there are no sets or costumes. There's also little or no stage movement. It's…

The twin objectives of the series Psychological Perspectives on Contemporary Educational Issues are: (1) to identify issues in education that are relevant to professional educators and researchers; and (2) to address those issues from research and theory in educational psychology, psychology, and related disciplines. The present volume, consisting…

Since 1997, England has seen massive changes in the Early Years including the introduction of an early childhood curriculum, free pre-school education for three-year-olds and local programmes for disadvantaged communities. Many of these initiatives took time to introduce and become established. Beginning in 2001, and each year thereafter until…

Many students who experience reading failure are inappropriately placed in special education. A promising response to reducing reading failure and the overidentification of students for special education is Response to Intervention (RTI), a comprehensive early detection and prevention system that allows teachers to identify and support struggling…

An analysis of large and influential published reviews of research pertaining to the reading acquisition of young struggling readers in the early years of schooling was undertaken. The reviews were selected on the basis that they either had been commissioned by federal governments or had been conducted by reputable research institutions and had…

Young children who are born deaf or hard of hearing are at risk for language and emergent literacy challenges. Emergent literacy skills play a significant role in early reading abilities for typically developing children with hearing. The purpose of this article is to (a) provide an overview of the research relating to oral language and emerging…

There is great pressure on parents to teach children to read as early as possible. In reality, precocious (early advanced) readers seem to almost master the skill on their own, without the assistance of highly touted, commercially available programs. The 18-month-old toddler who names the letters on alphabet blocks; or the 26-month-old who can…

The home environment provides children with their first literacy experiences. Parents are thus well-placed to facilitate the development of emergent literacy skills in their children before formal reading and writing begins at school. These emergent literacy skills include print awareness, motivation to explore print, shaping and writing skills,…

The audience for this guide is state, local, and program leaders who want to learn more about federal funding sources that can support early literacy programs and systems reform. Funding available through federal programs can help address the underlying causes of children failing to learn to read by the end of third grade, such as limited access…

Teaching students the most frequent sounds of the alphabet letters is the first crucial step in good phonics instruction. But beginning letter and sound lessons, especially if poorly taught or too rapidly paced, can be overwhelming and confusing for some young children and struggling readers. How can we simplify the cognitive task for such…

Teaching students with intellectual disabilities (ID) to read is extremely challenging. Fortunately, the outlook for students with ID is improving because we now know much more about how to teach reading to students who struggle, including those with ID. The central theme of this article is that reading instruction for students with ID must be a…

In "Beyond Test Scores: Leading Indicators for Education," Foley and colleagues (2008) define leading indicators as those that "provide early signals of progress toward academic achievement" (p. 1) and stress that educators "need leading indicators to help them see the direction their efforts are going in and to take…

This paper is an author-edited transcript of a presentation to the ALIA Public Libraries Summit, Canberra, July 2009. The author starts off by talking about what people know about children, early reading and a literate Australia. He then discusses three main reasons why public libraries have had success in children's literacy and related programs,…