A resource teacher describes her approach to helping prepare reading disabled students to use commercial preprimer, primer, and first grade materials through specially designed cloze sentences interspersed with questions. (CL)

This primer lists the 44 sounds in the English language and then gives steps for teaching those 44 sounds and their most common spelling patterns. In addition to learning sounds and spellings, each day the student must read lists of phonetically related words and spell these words from dictation. Phonics instruction must be reinforced by having…

"Helping Your Child Become a Reader" includes information about why and how to use language skills (talking and listening, reading, and writing) to help young children grow into readers. Everyday activities and a list of resources for parents to encourage children's love of reading and strengthen language skills are also provided. This brochure…

The Magnolia Speech School for the Deaf (Jackson, Mississippi) provides an intensive reading program for five preschool children. The program consists of four areas: the story reading session, primer reading, vocabulary development, and phonics. (SB)

Under what conditions can a true "science of mental life" arise from psychological investigations? Can psychology formulate scientific laws of a general nature, comparable in soundness to the laws of physics? I argue that the search for such laws must return to the forefront of psychological and developmental research, an enterprise that requires…

Phonological awareness is one of several key precursor skills to conventional literacy that develop during the preschool period. Significant amounts of research support the causal and predictive relation between phonological awareness and children's ease of learning to decode and spell. However, many preschool curricula and early childhood…

Kindergarten isn't what it used to be. No longer is kindergarten a place for learning the social skills needed for success at school and sprinkled with a few letters, numbers, shapes and sizes. Today, kindergartners are expected to head to first grade as beginning readers with basic skills in place to ensure their success in core content areas. To…

Almost every first grade has at least one Peter, one youngster who delivers the important note from his mother at the end of the day instead of in the morning and yet, he is not making much progress toward learning to read and write. He has all the characteristics that mark him as being one of those children who will struggle throughout his school…

In this article, the authors explain how one of them helped a struggling reader develop reading, writing, and self-regulatory strategies. The article is based on two foundations: Marie Clay's, the developer of Reading Recovery, ideas on the self-extending system of reading and Schunk and Zimmerman's four developmental levels of self-regulation…

William S. Gray, first president of the International Reading Association, is the focus of this booklet. Sections are devoted to "The Person," which includes Gray's family background, early schooling and teaching jobs, and his further education at Illinois State University, the University of Chicago, and Teachers College (Columbia…

A 3 year project to develop a beginning braille reading series was undertaken, beginning with research reviews on concept development, tactual perception, braille reading, and general reading. Analysis of vocabulary lists and specifications followed, culminating in development of the readiness, preprimer, and primer readers with accompanying…

Describes a reading lesson for first graders in which phonics is taught both explicitly and contextually. Discusses three prerequisite understandings about print that make learning to read much easier for children. Advocates a balanced approach toward literacy instruction that helps children integrate what they already know with new strategies,…

Describes how using a flashlight to read language experience chart stories can provide a concrete way to build a foundation for many emergent reader concepts, such as directionality. (SR)

Describes using reading centers, called Reading Choices, placed around a kindergarten room to provide kindergarten students with more opportunities to read and interact with stories and with print. (SR)

The purpose of this article is to describe how increasingly intensive, multilevel interventions can be used to ensure the increase in number of children who learn to read. We first review the promise and limitations of empirically validated best practices for mainstream classrooms. We then discuss results from a recent multilevel intervention…