Hearing stories can result in considerable incidental vocabulary development, for both first and second language acquisition (e.g. Elley 1992; Robbins and Ehri 1994; Senechal, LeFevre, Hudson and Lawson 1996). It has also been claimed, however, that direct instruction is more effective than incidental vocabulary acquisition and that combining both…

This study compared the development of storybook reading in 15 kindergartners from working class homes to that of kindergartners from middle class homes studied by Sulzby (1985). Nine girls and six boys from two kindergartens in a small, rural town in British Columbia, Canada, participated. Kindergarten teachers used a holistic approach to…

This manual of activities and reproducible drawings and worksheets is designed to encourage reading and to accompany a reading club program. Each chapter is centered around an Olympic sport. As each chapter begins, a bulletin board idea and nametag pattern are provided. This is followed by several storytime ideas for toddlers and preschoolers,…

A director of elementary education at a Chapter 1 school in a Southern, urban community designed and implemented a practicum study intended to expose disadvantaged kindergartners to stories and books. The primary goal was to stimulate the children's interest in books and desire to read. A second aim was to expand the scope of the practicum to…

Visual literacy--seeing with insight--enables child viewers of pictures to examine elements such as color, line, shape, form, depth, and detail to see what relations exist both among these components and between what is in the picture and their previous visual experience. The viewer can extract meaning and respond to it, either by talking or…

A study of the ways adults socialize children into particular patterns of literacy by helping them develop the literary and social knowledge necessary for using and understanding print is described in this monograph. Specifically, the monograph focuses on adults and children observed over a period of 18 months at a preschool, and provides insights…

It is common in teacher education programs to require a course in reading or language arts methods, at least for students preparing to be elementary teachers. The question for teachers of methods courses is how they can best prepare students to be teachers of reading. A common approach to teaching a reading methods class is to provide information,…

Research indicates the importance of the relationship between music, adult/child interaction, language practice, rhythm, repetition, familiarity of content, and story time, and a child's oral language development. Folk songs that have been illustrated and put into book form--"stories that sing"--can be used by parents and teachers to…

With this Child Development Associate (CDA) training manual the CDA intern can learn to teach language arts to preschool children in ways that foster their cognitive development. Upon completing the module, the trainee is expected to know how to read a story to preschool children, teach a lesson using an experience chart, set up a reading and…

In a study to determine whether or not culturally deprived children develop at progressively greater deficits in intellectual functioning during the ages of 15 months to 3 years, tutors provided 15-month-old infants with intellectual and verbal stimulation one hour daily, five times a week until they were 36 months old. The subjects consisted of…

This compilation of resource materials for the teaching of written composition in grades K-6 is based on the assemptions that the desire to write frequently results from the enjoyment and stimulation derived from reading what another has written; that children's literature offers the pupil contact with master writers; and that this contact may be…

The interaction of children and stories is examined in this book, with particular attention to the way in which children's language usage indicates the development of their concept of story. The first two chapters of the book discuss the topic from a broad perspective, seeking a theoretical framework for organizing children's language usage.…

In this story, a young Aleutian man relates his impressions about the arrival of the first Russian explorers on the Aleutian Islands in the 18th century. The story is to be used as part of the social studies unit, The Aleuts of the Eighteenth Century, to show the Aleutian perspective on the event. The narrator tells of the arrival of a strange…

The values, selection, and presentation of literature for young children are described in this pamphlet. The values discussed are educational importance and self-concept and interpersonal relationship development. The selection criteria include defining a good book, identifying types of literature which appeal to children, and noting the level,…

The readability level of 52 picture books was analyzed, and it was learned that the levels ranged from grade one to grade seven. (MKM)