The goal of the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) Practice Guide, "Foundational Skills to Support Reading for Understanding in Kindergarten through 3rd Grade," is to offer educators specific, evidence-based recommendations for teaching foundational reading skills to students in kindergarten through 3rd grade. The guide suggests…

Reviews "Happily Ever After," a reading readiness program that is designed to help those children who lack many of the concepts and abilities assumed by most readiness programs. (FL)

Parents can help young children learn to read or become better readers. Activities designed to be done at home each evening are suggested to teach and reinforce beginning reading skills. (MT)

Offers guidelines for helping children produce their own alphabet books. (FL)

This article presents summaries of research on 13 core understandings about learning to read, from "Building a Knowledge Base in Reading" (Jane Braunger and Jan Patricia Lewis). In the article, each core understanding is followed by activity ideas and strategies useful for tutors--these activities were created with one-on-one tutoring in…

Establishes a developmental perspective for using caption books (picture books with short language captions closely related to simple pictures), then details how the books can be used in the classroom. (FL)

Describes an instructional technique for expanding children's vocabulary that embodies the principle that learning involves relating new experiences to what is already known. (FL)

Blending means smoothing together subword segments to try to identify a spoken word. Research suggests that beginning readers need to blend to combine the phonemes they "sound out" into a recognizable approximation of a known word. Popular wisdom presumes blending is easiest when the segments of words are whispered and when syllables are…

The 48 phonemic awareness activities in this book can be used to supplement and enhance any reading program. Most of the activities in the book can be used for instructional purposes; however, the games and activity pages are intended for practice and review, not for the initial introduction or instruction of skills. After a discussion of what…

Presents scenarios from a kindergarten classroom in which dramatization is used extensively in conjunction with nonfiction books. Shows how the children acted out topics that ranged from the Pilgrims' first Thanksgiving to the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., showing that they were able to develop rich representations of nonfiction materials.…

Provides a number of suggestions for teaching children often confused words. (FL)

This article takes a look at Reading Recovery lesson elements to compare the teaching and learning within the lesson components to several areas of learning that have been identified at the national level as important to children's literacy learning. The lesson elements examined in the article are: (1) phonological awareness; (2) orthographic…

Discusses several ways teachers can use picture books for teaching prereading and reading skills. Reviews several such books. (FL)

Before children can make sense of phonics study, they first must learn that print conveys meaning. Children who do not have this foundation concept may do phonics workbook pages, but without understanding or processing the concepts. That is why--unlike books on traditional phonics teaching--this book emphasizes the making of sound instructional…

This book provides the tools classroom teachers need to determine which children lack the phonological awareness skills needed to become successful readers as well as to pinpoint deficiencies and address various needs. The book's unique features include the following: a comprehensive assessment that measures children's phonological awareness…