Current conversations about children's literacy have focused on the need for more phonics and decoding instruction and have sidelined the importance of children's language development, argues George Hruby. Language development involves more than the ability to decode written language. The ability to understand the meaning of those words is also…

In this book, the author challenges reductive views of emergent literacy prevalent in many of today's kindergarten and pre-K classrooms. As an alternative, Lysaker explains how reading wordless books with young children helps them to develop a range of comprehension abilities that are important for understanding narrative texts. Readers will find…

Children's literate development is mediated by classroom talk. That same talk also mediates children's emotional, relational, self-regulatory, and moral development. Consequently, the discourse of some literacy teaching practices may be important for shaping the course of human development, and those dimensions of human development can play…

The development of numerical concepts is described from infancy to preschool age. Infants a few days old exhibit an early sensitivity for numerosities. In the course of development, nonverbal mental models allow for the exact representation of small quantities as well as changes in these quantities. Subitising, as the accurate recognition of small…

The design of learning spaces is rightly gaining more and more pedagogical attention, as they influence the learning climate and learning results in multiple ways. General structural characteristics influence the willingness to learn through emotional well-being and a sense of security. Specific structural characteristics influence cognitive…

This article hones what is meant by "emergent comprehension". The authors define emergent comprehension as the period when young children, prior to conventional reading, engage in meaningful experiences that stimulate the development and use of meaning-making strategies with potential to affect later reading comprehension. The construct "emergent…

This article highlights the importance of the information obtained from the family in the implementation of the augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) system. The objective was to investigate the communicative abilities of children with severe communication deficit through their parents' reports within the family routine. Eleven parents…

A test of advanced theory of mind (ToM), first introduced by F. Happe (1994), was adapted for children (mental, human, animal, and nature stories plus unlinked sentences). These materials were closely matched for difficulty and were presented to forty-five 7- to 12-year-olds with autism and 27 control children. Children with autism who showed ToM…

Some features of project work are of value for toddlers, while others are best left until children are older. This article shares the process through which teachers and administrators at a private school in Mexico City gained awareness of the importance of listening, observing, and documenting children's activities to determine how to adapt…

The Workshop on the Role of Language in School Learning: Implications for Closing the Achievement Gap was held to explore three questions: What is known about the conditions that affect language development? What are the effects of early language development on school achievement? What instructional approaches help students meet school demands for…

Forty toddlers aged 20 to 24 months were presented with 32 pairs of images with the auditory stimulus Look followed by the name of the target image (e.g. "Look...tree") in an intermodal preferential looking (IPL) paradigm. The same series of 16 items was presented first with one image as target and then with the other member of the pair as target.…

Williams syndrome is a rare neurodevelopmental disorder caused by deletion of approximately 25 genes on chromosome 7q11.23. Children with the syndrome evidence large individual differences in both broad language and reading abilities. Nevertheless, as a group, children with this syndrome show a consistent pattern characterized by relative…

Today, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is the most common and most studied psychiatric disorder of childhood, affecting approximately five percent of school-aged children. That means that there are probably at least two children with ADHD in any average elementary school class. In the last 20 years, there has been an explosion in…

Although childhood death from health-related disorders has decreased dramatically in the United States due largely to advances in medical technology, it is an unfortunate fact of life that children can and do die from medical and health-related problems. A possible role for school psychologists in dealing with this situation is providing direct…

One distal, cognitive component of parenting is knowledge of infant development. This multifaceted construct includes knowledge of developmental norms, parental skills, and abstract principles of development. Generally, it has been assumed that knowledge of development affects childrearing practices; this assumption is documented in various bodies…