Designed to offer a balanced instructional approach for language arts, this book combines a systematic phonics program with whole language. It teaches reading skills by using the children's own language, basal readers, poems, and songs, and by emphasizing writing, spelling, listening, and speaking skills. The book includes daily lesson plans, strategies and activities, transparency masters, and other reproducible resources. It provides detailed reading assignments, sample letters to parents about reading at home, ideas on using colors, chalkboards, and overhead to teach reading, and tips on using tape recorders, flashcards, magnets, and pocket charts. Lessons in the book reinforce and build on students' prior learning. The book provides first-grade teachers with detailed lesson plans for the first 20 days of school, plus lessons, techniques, and activities to use throughout the school year. For kindergarten teachers, the book offers idea to use with early readers, and for second- and third-grade teachers, it can be used to review students' skills and to work with slower students. A list of additional resources and a bibliography conclude the book. (NKA)