Discover how to help PreK students develop pre-reading competencies that build capacity for future reading phonological awareness, print concepts, and alphabetics. Research-based and accessible, this essential guidebook helps readers sidestep common errors and create engaging, child-appropriate curriculum that lays a strong foundation for future reading skills. Filled with effective resources, activities, and a simple scope and sequence to guide instruction, this critical toolkit equips educators to set emerging learners up for success.

From Atticus, the altruistic astronaut, to Zooey, the zonked zombie, this book revamps the ABCs. C is for Cat? D is for dog? Not in this book! Here, Colossal Cornelius captures his companions with his camera and Daisy the diver dares a death-defying dip with dinosaurs. In Alphabetics, each of the alphabet's twenty-six letters is depicted with an awesome alliteration--not to mention an illuminating illustration--that will captivate and stimulate young minds. Although the lettered tales are meant to be humorous and fun, they also serve a commendable purpose. Complex words are introduced to expand children's vocabularies and linguistic horizons. The book includes a glossary so that readers can look up any terms that are unfamiliar to them.

Alphabetic letters are ubiquitous, multivalent, and largely ignored. Playful Letters reveals their important cultural contributions through Alphabetics—a new interpretive model for understanding artistic production that attends to the signifying interplay of the graphemic, phonemic, lexical, and material capacities of letters. A key period for examining this interplay is the century and a half after the invention of printing, with its unique media ecology of print, manuscript, sound, and image. Drawing on Shakespeare, anthropomorphic typography, figured letters, and Cyrillic pedagogy and politics, this book explores the ways in which alphabetic thinking and writing inform literature and the visual arts, and it develops reading strategies for the “letterature” that underwrites such cultural production. Playful Letters begins with early modern engagements with the alphabet and the human body—an intersection where letterature emerges with startling force. The linking of letters and typography with bodies produced a new kind of literacy. In turn, educational habits that shaped letter learning and writing permeated the interrelated practices of typography, orthography, and poetry. These mutually informing processes render visible the persistent crumbling of words into letters and their reconstitution into narrative, poetry, and image. In addition to providing a rich history of literary and artistic alphabetic interrogation in early modern Western Europe and Russia, Playful Letters contributes to the continuous story of how people use new technologies and media to reflect on older forms, including the alphabet itself.

A method is described for designing by computer a binary decision tree that, using the coefficients determined by the learning process, would speed up the classification of patterns.

The letters of the alphabet are transformed and incorporated into twenty-six illustrations, so that the hole in "b" becomes a balloon and "y" turns into the head of a yak.