The difficulties children face as they are learning to read is the focus of this book, which is a collection of children's work (drawings and handwriting), with statements exploring their implications. The introduction discusses the relationship between early writing and early reading, individual differences, the question of age norms, questions…

This nontechnical guide for parents and teachers examines learning to read from infants' babbling to the fluent reading of children reading independently for pleasure. Chapter 1, "Baby Speaks," describes language development in infancy. Chapter 2, "Our Alphabet: Language by Ear and by Eye," presents the alphabetic system and…

Noting that much has been written about children who have difficulty learning to read but little has been written about children who are fluent early readers, this book explores why some children succeed in reading at a very early age. The book resulted from a 3-year research project that studied the progress of 29 English children before they…

Noting that many parents who might teach their young children are often discouraged by a lack of information or fear of being labeled "pushy," this book provides parents with a step-by-step program for teaching preschoolers letters and numbers as a way of giving children a head start on formal education. The handbook consists of a…