To gather information on the relationship of parent behavior during reading situations to preschool children's cognitive ability, a study of 12 female and 9 male preschool children and their parents was undertaken. Children were administered a battery of tests that measured intelligence, creativity, perceived self-competence, and language skills.…

The primary goal of this practicum was to provide opportunities for rich and diverse language activities designed to enhance the kindergarten curriculum. New instructional guidelines were designed that encouraged daily classroom time devoted to language development activities. These activities replaced all formal isolated skill instruction.…

An intergenerational literacy program was developed for 40 teenage parents and their children enrolled in an alternative education center. The program was designed to empower teenage parents to develop the emerging literacy of their children while reducing their own literacy deficiencies. The Once upon a Time-Together program acquainted teenage…

The Children's Art Carnival (CAC) is an intensive holistic reading and reading-oriented arts program for Chapter 1-eligible students who have scored below the cut-off point on a standardized reading test or have performed poorly in the classroom. This report presents the findings of evaluations of the 1990-91 and 1991-92 programs by the Office of…

This handbook for parents stresses the ways in which children benefit when the responsibility for education is shared by the school and the home. The first section of the handbook proposes that parents' attitudes and their relationship with their children may be the most influential factors in children's success in school. It further proposes that…

This ERIC/RCS Special Collection contains 4 ERIC Digests (brief syntheses of the research on a specific topic in contemporary education) and 14 FAST Bibs (Focused Access to Selected Topics--annotated bibliographies with selected entries from the ERIC database), providing up-to-date information in an accessible format. The collection focuses on…

This literature review examines selected variables that may influence teachers' ability to read books to preschool and elementary deaf children in total communication programs. The paper explores the role of signs in reading stories and factors influencing the signability of stories, including reading rate, length of sentences, length of text used…

This article examines the approaches to storytelling used by Greek parents with their preschool children. The first part of the article discusses the types of stories chosen and the reading approaches employed by the parents. The second part examines the extratextual interactions between parents and children related to content during storytelling.…

A practicum was designed to increase the amount of time parents read to their kindergarten children. Fifteen parents in a suburban area participated in a series of teacher-presented workshops to discover the value of reading aloud, learn strategies for presenting literature, and practice reading aloud to their children. All seven of the behavioral…

Based on the hypothesis that teachers' naturally occurring presentations of storyreading have an effect on children's literacy learning, a study examined whether teachers can be trained to provide a structure for listening to stories and whether this type of presentation would result in significant gains in children's story understanding. Five…

Illiteracy is intergenerational and is correlated with poverty. Especially significant is the effect of the mother's education level on children's academic achievement. A number of recent initiatives are emphasizing the role of parents as reading boosters. However, this approach fuels the debate between those who view literacy as skill development…

Among those who share the responsibility for developing the reading habit in children are the child's family, schools, libraries, publishers, booksellers, and the mass media. There are many ways to read, just as there are many kinds of reading materials, including poetry and narrative stories. Some children read only to follow the plot, others add…

Intended to help librarians plan a summer program of activities for children, this planning manual provides deadline schedules, activity suggestions, book lists and other items necessary in starting such a program. The introduction to the manual explains the goals of a library summer program, and notes that the theme offered, "The Greatest…

Intended as a companion volume for librarians planning a children's summer reading program, this activity manual provides ideas for games, puzzles, puppet shows, story reading, and more, all based on the theme of "Circus Summer." The manual suggests ways to promote the program, such as visits to schools, and provides directions for…

The intent of this study was to examine the effectiveness of elements of the thematic-fantasy play training paradigm in facilitating children's immediate and maintained story comprehension. Thematic-fantasy play was defined as play in which children enact themes and events not related to their everyday experience, as when they act out a fairy…