Early Childhood Literacy Centers Visual Discrimination

These engaging hands-on activities provide students with hours of fun-filled learning experiences throughout the year. The activities are in an easy-to-follow format and require little preparation time and few materials.

Take It to Your Seat Literacy Centers, Grades 4-5 has everything you need for 16 folder centers that are ideal for small group and individual practice. Center activities practice reading and writing skills. The skills practiced include the following: * using context clues * syllabication * writing stories * analogies * using the table of contents and index * using descriptive language * synonyms * antonyms * figurative language * combining sentences * editing letters * writing poetry * root words * writing directions * classifying sentence types * multiple meaning words

The most pressing challenge in early childhood education today is to find a way to meet the standards within a developmentally appropriate approach. In this book, two active early childhood educators provide teachers with resources to bring content alive and document it in every-day, action-based pre–K and Kindergarten classrooms. The book includes lists of key content ideas—coordinated with learning standards in science, mathematics, social studies, and the communication arts—to guide teacher observations of, and interactions with, young children. Chapters focus on ways to extend children’s emerging use of content in the block, manipulative, sand and water, drama, expressive arts, and literacy centers, as well as link to the development of themes. Book features include: Lists of key ideas in the content areas. Examples of conversations that nurture children’s emerging content understandings. Vignettes from the field illustrating teachers’ experiences of embedding content into center activities, along with photographs. Sample forms for documenting children’s learning as they meet the standards in a variety of contexts. Sydney L. Schwartzis a Professor Emerita of Queens College of the City University of New York.Sherry M. Copelandis an experienced early childhood teacher, teacher trainer, advocate, and director of early childhood programs.

Prepare opportunities for purposeful play with students in grades PK–K using Let's Learn and Play! This 160-page book is a comprehensive resource for creating purposeful play centers that help students solve problems, experiment, navigate social situations, and prepare for learning. These well-designed, modifiable center ideas allow teachers to put a personal stamp on the classroom. The book supports NAEYC standards.

For introductory courses in Early Childhood literacy. A well-known early childhood author joins with a literacy expert to offer a brand new approach to early literacy in preschool, leading into kindergarten reading. New research on how literacy emerges is put to use in chapters on setting up a literacy-friendly learning environment, music and art as natural languages, strengthening finger muscles for writing through 3-dimensional art, cooking, and woodworking, developing visual representational skills ( a la Reggio Emilia), developing the important sense of story sequence through role-plays, story reenactments, and flannel board stories. Teachers are asked to make a paradigm shift in regard to their opinion of children's books as mere sources of entertainment. This text uses picture books as keys to unlocking an entire curriculum of literacy activities, with cultural book characters like real children, leading preschool and kindergarten listeners into learning centers filled with exciting literacy activities for them to pursue on their own. (teacher-oriented) are discussed along with suggestions on how and when to use each. A discussion of the new early childhood curriculum standards suggests ways to incorporate them in early childhood classrooms.

This book started with a simple idea -- examine models of reading instruction that have emerged during the past 20 years. These models span a wide range of instruction representing a continuum from highly structured, task analytic instruction to child-centered and holistic instruction. Each model has its own epistemology or views on how "reading" and "instruction" are to be defined. The different epistemologies indicate different principles of instruction which, in turn, indicate different practices in the classroom. Each model is also supported by a different research base. In this volume, leading proponents of these different models discuss their ideas about reading instruction thereby encouraging readers to make their own comparisons and contrasts. The chapter authors seem to adopt the editors' eclectic approach--to some greater or lesser extent--incorporating aspects of other models into their instruction as they see other goals. Thus, models of reading instruction are complex. Complicating matters further is the fact that teachers hold their own models of reading, which may or may not be congruent with those discussed here. Although academically developed models influence college preservice and in-service instruction, teachers' own models of reading filter the information that they take from what they learn from these perspectives. By carefully examining these variables, this book makes a firm contribution toward disciplined inquiry into what it means to teach reading.