Providing an overview of some of the possibilities for enhancing education in afterschool programs, this manual provides ideas and strategies to help children and youth develop a love of learning and illustrates how much community youth development program experiences are vital to the educational growth and development of young people. Many of the…

This book examines ways parents can use their child's interests to develop positive reading attitudes, read aloud to their child, and select books for children--with the goal of developing life-long readers. The first chapter, Creating Interest and Positive Attitudes, discusses developing an early interest in reading, the "language story"…

This booklet for parents, in both English and Spanish, offers suggestions for helping their young children develop and improve their reading skills. The booklet first presents tips for helping infants or preschoolers be ready to read and ready to learn. Suggestions include talking to the infant or toddler, reading aloud starting at 6 months,…

Reviews research showing the positive effects of reading aloud to preschool children in the areas of language development, reading interests, reading and academic readiness, and social attitudes. (FL)

Discusses the critical relationships among play, learning to read, and early reading achievement. Gives examples of kindergarten play activities that nurture the ability to read, including painting, playing with lettered blocks, movement activities, sociodramatic play, and field trips. (FL)

Examined secondary school teachers' (n=6) beliefs about effective second-language reading instruction. All teachers believed reading proficiency is facilitated by providing students with frequent opportunities for reading practice, use of the target language is preferable for reading instruction, and oral reading interferes with comprehension, but…

Explores how the emerging literacy stage emphasizes the child's primary role in his or her individual progression in becoming literate. Provides guidance to teachers and parents to promote a child's language experimentation by emphasizing a supportive environment and enhancing natural learning by encouraging reading to children, self-directed…

Using a multiple-choice test and a story frame test, this study measured the effect on reading comprehension of reading a story aloud to English-as-a-Second-Language students. Findings indicate that these students outperformed on both tests those students who read the story silently. (Six references) (Author/CK)

This article describes how a first-grade teacher used poetry to provide students of diverse ability levels with reading and language activities that stimulated their interest and improved basic skills. Activities with poetry included reading the poems aloud individually and as a group, discussing and analyzing the poems' words and meanings, and…

Discusses subvocalization and other ways in which people read silently. Comments on authorial voice and offers ways to experiment with creative reading aloud. Notes how the proliferation of advertising, the media "explosion," and the influence of modernism in literature has changed the fundamental sense of what reading is and how to do…

Investigates how children represent meaning in their response to stories through listening, speaking, reading, drawing, and writing. Finds no one particular language process to be exclusively used by children to convey meaning in response to story. Discovers sequential and simultaneous linkage patterns of language process modality. (KEH)

Offers several suggestions for activities to be used with Big Books, including: tracking print, thinking along, cloze activities, and examining text features. (MG)

Encourages teachers to share appropriate information about books and reading with parents in order to influence storybook reading in their students' homes. (MG)

Examines the influence of a regular book borrowing service designed to enable and encourage parents to read to their children. Finds no statistically significant difference between control and experimental groups on a reading test, but finds an unexpectedly high level of parental interest. (RS)

Describes parent-child activities during storybook reading, suggesting that interactive reading (constructing meaning) is more developmentally enriching than attending to story. Found that Curacaoan mothers were more concerned with child's understanding of story than with constructing meaning. Argues that parents should be trained in dialog that…