The Massachusetts Board of Education recently adopted a 5-year plan to assist Local Education Agencies (LEAs) in the curriculum areas of reading, writing, arithmetic, science, and computer literacy. However, reduction in funds and staff at the LEA level has decreased the ability of local programs to implement marketing and assistance. This manual,…

Teaching ideas and learning activities for using newspapers to improve reading achievement, reading motivation, and writing skills are provided in this guide. Most of the guide consists of student activity sheets and is designed to assist elementary and secondary teachers in the use of newspapers as teaching tools. The eight sections (and their…

Given preschool children's characteristically short attention spans and unpredictable interests, teachers can encourage early reading most effectively and appropriately through the systemization of informal or incidental, rather than formal, learning. They can make learning to read relevant to traditional preschool activities in a number of ways.…

Part of a program to increase the academic growth of preschool and primary grade students through the utilization of brain hemisphere research, this volume contains lessons designed to improve basic reading skills. Material is divided into two sections. Section 1 contains 17 activities to develop letter and word recognition. In activities 1-12,…

A series of 10 high-interest, low-vocabulary reading books for adult basic education students is presented. The series begins with very simple vocabulary and gets progressively more difficult from book to book. Each book contains from four to six stories which focus on the lives and relationships of a variety of humorous characters living in a…

A privately funded project that placed reading aides in the first three grades of the public schools was initiated in a rural county of Mississippi. The program provided a paraprofessional assistant reading instructor who worked under the direction of a classroom teacher to strengthen and enrich children's work in small groups or in an educational…

The human brain is composed of two interdependent systems, the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere. While the left brain analyzes sequentially the phonemes of our language and names or reads words, the right brain produces the images, feelings, and associations connected with the words. Current educational systems, however, are doing little…

This study was an attempt to replicate the results of a master's thesis by Marie Davis (Kean College, New Jersey, 1982) in which teachers' attitudes towards pull-out (student leaves the regular classroom for instruction by the compensatory reading teacher) and in-class (compensatory reading teacher works with the child within the confines of the…

Grade 3 and grade 4 classrooms in a California bilingual Spanish/English environment were studied. In the first study, reading lessons were observed and analyzed in a bilingual classroom. Using the analysis of this experience, in the second study a series of theory-driven experimental interventions were initiated. It was found that the achievement…

This booklet was developed to offer practical advice to those in charge of, or attempting to develop, a small literacy program. The guide is organized in nine narrative sections that provide information on the following topics: beginning a literacy program, assessing the need, program structure, building a program, financing a program,…

Designed to be used primarily as a reader for first and second graders, but also as a speller and vocabulary builder for any student who needs help in language arts mastery, this book combines phonics with the "Look and Say" methods to present a step-by-step learning guide. Following an introduction explaining the five-step procedure…

A study investigated kindergarten children's awareness of how they are learning to read at home and in school. Fifty-six children were selected from two schools with contrasting instruction for beginning reading. Children were interviewed in kindergarten and first grade and asked questions designed to tap their awareness of how they were learning…

To determine the effect of training in reciprocal teaching on collaborative learning, a study of six middle school remedial reading classes was undertaken. Reciprocal teaching is a method in which the teacher participates both as a leader and as respondent. Before the experiment began, the teachers were trained for a day in reciprocal teaching and…

This is a collection of school improvement materials from the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory (NREL) school improvement research series. A topical synthesis, two "close-ups," and four "snapshots" focus on core aspects of early childhood education (ECE) and elementary education. The topical synthesis examines: (1) what…

This document contains two inservice presentations. Each presentation has a full script with transparencies, handouts, graphs, and a list of materials needed for the presentation. The first presentation describes eight ideas common to both mathematics and reading namely, that: (1) a comprehensive instruction program is needed; (2) educators teach…