An ESEA Title III language development program, originating in Mifflinburg, Pennsylvania, is presented in 60 twenty-minute lessons to help prepare preschoolers for the reading experience. Four areas of language usage and reading readiness are stressed--auditory discrimination or phonology, letter discrimination, stylistics, and morphology,…

This book discusses a plan for "learning to read through experience." It is a plan for developing reading ability as an integral part of the development of all the communication skills. It is intended to build on and to continue to provide individual experiences for each child while increasing the common group experiences. Although the plan…

The purpose of this publication is to show parents how they can facilitate their children's growth in reading. Section one suggests numerous parental activities to aid children's reading growth, such as reading to children, talking and listening to them, giving them responsibilities, and building a reading atmosphere at home. Sections two and…

Twenty-nine kindergarten children judged to have weak or inadequate psychomotor abilities affecting their acquisition of written language participated in a psychomotor training program. The program used rhythmic, optic, phonemic, kinesthetic, and melodic exercises to attempt to facilitate the children's language acquisition and thus to improve…

Research studies have attributed the reading failure of children from low socioeconomic groups to factors such as hunger, poor physical health, substandard living conditions, and the language mismatch that results from the difference between spoken nonstandard dialect and printed standard English. While each of these does influence reading…

The development of 10 preschool children who attended the Southeast Kansas Demonstration Child Development Center was compared with the development of 10 preschool children who did not attend a child care center to ascertain the value of the center's program. Both groups were tested with the Denver Developmental Screening Test at the beginning and…

The DPI Criterion-Referenced Pre-Reading Screening Test is to be used as one means of identifying some strengths and weaknesses in certain areas of pre-reading skills. It is intended to be used as a screening instrument for beginning first graders. The areas of pre-reading skills to be screened are (1) auditory perception, (2) letter knowledge,…

Suggested ways in which parents can prepare their children for academic success before formal schooling begins are listed in this guide. Part 1 contains ideas for language development in the areas of speaking, listening, vocabulary development, and recall. Part 2 contains suggestions for activities that will promote social development and…

Reading requires the synthesis of auditory and visual skills and therefore involves almost all of the brain. Stages of reading include prereading skills (requiring an adequate spoken vocabulary), the ability to name letters and pictures, good memory for spoken sentences, and manual dexterity in copying patterns. Learning to read involves the…

This study describes and tests the aptitude treatment interaction (ATI) approach to reading. The rationale which forms the basis of ATI--pairing student to method--evolved from the works of Piaget and other psychologists whose studies focus on the general, and cognitive, development of children. From these studies, it was determined that…

A total of 211 kindergarten children, aged 63 to 81 months, were classified into two groups according to the risk of failure in first grade predicted for them on the basis of their performance on the Wide Range Achievement Test (WRAT) and the Draw a Person (DAP) test. According to prediction, Group I children without intervention would probably…

The broad purpose of this study was to investigate some ways of predicting the language arts achievement of kindergarten children in order that their academic needs more nearly may be met. The Metropolitan Readiness Test (given to 16 subjects at the end of kindergarten) and the Metropolitan Achievement Test, Primary I, the Purdue Perceptual Motor…

A variety of factor analysis techniques were employed to explore the structure of five reading readiness instruments (Gates Reading Readiness Test, Developmental Tests of Visual Perception, Metropolitan Readiness Tests, Specially Constructed Readiness Test by Olson, Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children) as predictor variables of performance on…

This preschool program offered a highly structured curriculum in which language development was fostered through encouraging verbal responses in a game format context. The curriculum, based on skills and concepts required for success in elementary school, included language arts, reading readiness, mathematical concepts, science, and social…

This paper reviews the evolution and implementation of the "Sesame Street" curriculum relating to the development of language and prereading skills. The first section gives a brief history of the Children's Television Workshop, describes the operational model followed by the Workshop in carrying out its initial experiment, and suggests…