Lessons, strategies, management tips, and organizational techniques to help you lead your young learners to reading sucess, while maintaining the sense of joy and playfulness that are the hallmarks of kindergartners everywhere.

Kindergarten is a time for playful and enriching learning activities that support children's literacy emergence while enhancing their social and cognitive development. The routines of a busy, engaged, productive kindergarten classroom are vividly brought to life in this information-packed book. Demonstrated are whole-class and small-group strategies for helping children acquire concepts about print and the alphabet, build phonological and phonemic awareness, learn to read sight words, develop their listening comprehension and writing abilities, and much more.

How does a young child begin to make sense out of squiggles on a page? Is learning to read a process of extending already acquired language abilities to print? What comprises this extension? How children learn to read, and especially how children are taught to read, are problems of sustained scientific interest and enduring pedagogical controversy. This volume presents conceptual and theoretical analyses of learning to read, research on the very beginning processes of learning to read, as well as research on phonological abilities and on children who have problems learning to read. In so doing, it reflects the important discovery that learning to read requires mastering the system by which print encodes the language. The editors hope that some of the work offered in this text will influence future research questions and will make a difference in the way instructional issues are formulated.

As the first title in the new series, New Directions in Communication Disorders Research: Integrative Approaches, this volume discusses a unique phenomenon in cognitive science, single-word reading, which is an essential element in successful reading competence. Single-word reading is an interdisciplinary area of research that incorporates phonological, orthographic, graphemic, and semantic information in the representations suitable for the task demands of reading. Editors Elena L. Grigorenko and Adam J. Naples have organized a collection of essays written by an outstanding group of scholars in order to systematically sample research on this important topic, as well as to describe the research within different experimental paradigms. Single-Word Reading provides an introduction to unfamiliar areas of research, and is an inspiration for future study. The introductory chapter sets up a contextual stage for connections between spoken and written word processing, the stage-based nature of their development, and the role of education. Succeeding chapters address visual word processing; the role of morphology in word recognition; the role of lexical representation; the biological bases of single-word reading and related processes; and more. Reading researchers will take interest in this substantial book, as will professionals and practitioners linked to the teaching of reading in the departments of school psychology, special education, communication disorders, neuroscience, cognitive science, linguistics, and reading.

In one concise volume, Darrell Morris provides a complete tool for assessing students' reading ability. Unlike most informal reading inventories (IRIs), Morris's approach incorporates measures of automaticity (word recognition and fluency) together with oral reading accuracy and comprehension. This results in more efficient, accurate, and thorough assessments. Included are an examiner's manual and all test materials for the basic IRI (grades 2-8) plus a separate beginning reading inventory (grades K-1). In a large-size spiral-bound format for ease of use, the book features more than 90 pages of word/letter lists, illustrated reading passages, and other test materials, all with permission to photocopy. See also Morris's Diagnosis and Correction of Reading Problems, Second Edition, which guides teachers through a comprehensive diagnostic battery for planning instruction and intervention.

Teachers interested in transforming their traditional kindergartens into child-centred Whole Language classrooms now have a model for change.