Proven ideas from research for parents.

"Prepare students for future success by using effective reading instruction that's proven to work. The Teaching Reading Sourcebook, updated second edition is an indispensable resource that combines evidence-based research with actionable instructional strategies. It is an essential addition to any educator's professional literacy library--elementary, secondary, university."--P. [4] of cover.

This book provides advice intended to empower new teachers with the tools necessary to feel prepared, confident, and comfortable and to succeed, maintain enthusiasm, and remain committed to teaching. Among the numerous strategies and survival skills it promotes are time and stress management, effective organization, quality lesson plans, and professional development. Nine chapters focus on: (1) "You are Not Alone" (e.g., fitting in and establishing relationships); (2) "Organizing Your Classroom and Yourself" (e.g, setting up the classroom and finding time and balance in one's personal and professional life); (3) "Learner-Friendly Classroom Management" (e.g., routines and increasing efficiency with classroom monitors); (4) "Preparing Lesson Plans and Units that Engage Students" (e.g., basic instructional approaches and time on task); (5) "Preventing Discipline Problems" (e.g., motivating students and increasing positive interactions); (6) "Assessing Student Learning and Performance" (e.g., classroom assessment programs and tips for assessing learning); (7) "Developing Partnerships with Parents" (e.g., parent conferences and back-to-school night); (8) "Frequently Asked Questions (and Answers!)" (e.g., entire class misbehaving and student apathy); and (9) "Your Own Professional Development" (e.g., reflecting on practice and teaching portfolios). (Contains 39 references.) (SM).

While most children learn to read fairly well, there remain many young Americans whose futures are imperiled because they do not read well enough to meet the demands of our competitive, technology-driven society. This book explores the problem within the context of social, historical, cultural, and biological factors. Recommendations address the identification of groups of children at risk, effective instruction for the preschool and early grades, effective approaches to dialects and bilingualism, the importance of these findings for the professional development of teachers, and gaps that remain in our understanding of how children learn to read. Implications for parents, teachers, schools, communities, the media, and government at all levels are discussed. The book examines the epidemiology of reading problems and introduces the concepts used by experts in the field. In a clear and readable narrative, word identification, comprehension, and other processes in normal reading development are discussed. Against the background of normal progress, Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children examines factors that put children at risk of poor reading. It explores in detail how literacy can be fostered from birth through kindergarten and the primary grades, including evaluation of philosophies, systems, and materials commonly used to teach reading.

This Encyclopedia is a reference work about young children in the USA, designed for use by policy makers, community planners, parents of young children, teacher and early childhood educators, programme and school administrators, among others. The field of early childhood education has been affected by changes taking place in the nation’s economy, demographics, schools, communities and families that influence political and professional decisions. These diverse historical, political economic, socio-cultural, intellectual and educational influences on early childhood education have hindered the development of a clear definition of the field. The Encyclopedia provides an opportunity to define the field against the background of these influences and relates the field of early childhood education to its diverse contexts and to the cultural and technological resources currently affecting it.

Recognizing the characteristics of children with learning disabilities and deciding how to help them is a problem faced by schools all over the world. Although some disorders are fairly easily recognizable (e.g., mental retardation) or very specific to single components of performance and quite rare (e.g., developmental dyscalculia), schools must consider much larger populations of children with learning difficulties who cannot always be readily classified. These children present high-level learning difficulties that affect their performance on a variety of school tasks, but the underlying problem is often their difficulty in understanding written text. In many instances, despite good intellectual abilities and a superficial ability to cope with written texts and to use language appropriately, some children do not seem to grasp the most important elements, or cannot find the pieces of information they are looking for. Sometimes these difficulties are not immediately detected by the teacher in the early school years. They may be hidden because the most obvious early indicators of reading progress in the teacher's eyes do not involve comprehension of written texts or because the first texts a child encounters are quite simple and reflect only the difficulty level of the oral messages (sentences, short stories, etc.) with which the child is already familiar. However, as years go by and texts get more complex, comprehension difficulties will become increasingly apparent and increasingly detrimental to effective school learning. In turn, studying, assimilating new information, and many other situations requiring text comprehension -- from problem solving to reasoning with linguistic contents -- could be affected. Problems with decoding, dyslexia, and language disorders have attracted more interest from researchers than have specific comprehension problems and have occupied more room in specialized journals. Normal reading comprehension has also been a favorite with researchers. However, scarce interest has been paid to subjects who have comprehension difficulties. This book is an attempt to remedy this situation. In so doing, this volume answers the following questions: * Does a reading comprehension problem exist in schools? * How important and widespread is the problem? * Is the problem specific? * How can a reading comprehension difficulty be defined and identified? * Does the "syndrome" have a single pattern or can different subtypes be identified? * What are the main characteristics associated with a reading comprehension difficulty? * When can other well-identified problems add to our understanding of reading comprehension difficulties? * Which educational strategies are effective in preventing and treating reading comprehension difficulties? * What supplementary information can we get from an international perspective?