This resource presents assessment and instructional activities that are evidence based, practical, and easy to implement. This comprehensive text demonstrates how to link assessment and instruction practices for every component of literacy learning and helps teachers become informed decision makers about purposeful literacy instruction. Addressing the Early Reading First areas of phonological awareness, print knowledge, and language development, the book also covers parent involvement, integrated curriculum, and suggestions for working with children with special needs and English language learners. Using vignettes of four children representing diverse backgrounds, the authors weave together theory and practice and describe how instructional strategies are implemented in classroom settings. Each chapter contains figures and graphic organizers and includes sections on instructional strategies, assessment, and diversity

This accessible text is about the most exciting and important aspect of human development - language in the early years (O-8). The book is aimed at carers, parents, teachers and other professionals who work and play with young children.

One of two parents' guides based on the revised National Curriculum, this book is intended as an introduction to Key Stages 1 and 2. The need for parents to be involved in their children's education has taken root in recent years. To be able to make choices, however, parents need to be informed. This book is intended to enable them to get to grips with the elements of the National Curriculum and topical issues.

Provides a comprehensive, reader-friendly introduction to literacy teaching and learning, exploring both theoretical underpinnings and practical strategies.

The importance of the early years in young children’s lives and the rigid inequality in literacy achievement are a stimulating backdrop to current research in young children’s language and literacy development. This book reports new data and empirical analyses that advance the theory of language and literacy, with researchers using different methodologies in conducting their study, with both a sound empirical underpinning and a captivating analytical rationalization of the results. The contributors to this volume used several methodological methods (e.g. quantitative, qualitative) to describe the complete concept of the study; the achievement of the study; and the study in an appropriate manner based on the study’s methodology. The contributions to this volume cover a wide range of topics, including dual language learners; Latino immigrant children; children who have hearing disabilities; parents’ and teachers’ beliefs about language development; early literacy skills of toddlers and preschool children; interventions; multimodalities in early literacies; writing; and family literacy. The studies were conducted in various early childhood settings such as child care, nursery school, Head Start, kindergarten, and primary grades, and the subjects in the studies represent the pluralism of the globe – a pluralism of language, backgrounds, ethnicity, abilities, and disabilities. This book was originally published as a special issue of Early Child Development and Care.

As a resource book designed for teachers of preschool and kindergarten students, the text provides classroom strategies, case studies, classroom management techniques, and home-school connections to facilitate teaching the language arts. Strategies for the bilingual classrooms are also included.

Current research increasingly highlights the role of early literacy in young children's development--and facilitates the growth of practices and policies that promote success among diverse learners. The Handbook of Early Literacy Research presents cutting-edge knowledge on all aspects of literacy learning in the preschool years. Volume 1 covers such essential topics as major theories of early literacy; writing development; understanding learning disabilities, including early intervention approaches; cultural and socioeconomic contexts of literacy development; and tutoring programs and other special intervention efforts.

Current research increasingly highlights the role of early literacy in young children's development--and informs practices and policies that promote success among diverse learners. The Handbook of Early Literacy Research presents cutting-edge knowledge on all aspects of literacy learning in the early years. Volume 2 provides additional perspectives on important topics covered in Volume 1 and addresses critical new topics: the transition to school, the teacher-child relationship, sociodramatic play, vocabulary development, neuroimaging work, Vygotskian theory, findings from international studies, and more.

Children, Film and Literacy explores the role of film in children's lives. The films children engage in provide them with imaginative spaces in which they create, play and perform familiar and unfamiliar, fantasy and everyday narratives and this narrative play is closely connected to identity, literacy and textual practices. Family is key to the encouragement of this social play and, at school, the playground is also an important site for this activity. However, in the literacy classroom, some children encounter a discontinuity between their experiences of narrative at home and those that are valued in school. Through film children develop understandings of the common characteristics of narrative and the particular 'language' of film. This book demonstrates the ways in which children are able to express and develop distinct and complex understandings of narrative, that is to say, where they can draw on their own experiences (including those in a moving image form). Children whose primary experiences of narrative are moving images face particular challenges when their experiences are not given opportunities for expression in the classroom, and this has urgent implications for the teaching of literacy.