Research suggests that providing children with activities that involve using their bodies to form the shapes of letters can help them acquire pre-reading skills. Little is known, however, as to the extent to which such embodied learning interventions are superior to more traditional pencil-and-paper activities, which of specific arm or body…

This article describes how preschool-age children can engage with recipes as a genre for reading, writing, and play. This formative/design study was conducted by a teacher researcher partnership in a linguistically and socioeconomically diverse public early learning center. Through home engagements, the research team identified cooking as a site…

This article addresses the characteristics of learners in the emergent stage of literacy development and describes two instructional practices that facilitate the development of the alphabetic principle and concept of word in text.

This study examined the development of beginning writing skills in kindergarten and the relationship between early writing skills and early reading skills. Sixty children were assessed on beginning writing skills (including letter writing, individual sound spelling, and real and nonsense word spelling) and beginning reading skills (including…

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…