Designed to promote literacy in young children and to empower parents, educators, and librarians, this guide is filled with simple strategies, creative activities, and detailed instructions that help make reading fun. Encouraging a love of reading in young children can be a source of both great frustration and immense joy. This handy resource provides essential tips, techniques, and strategies for making early literacy development fun and inspiring a lifelong love of reading. Read, Rhyme, and Romp: Early Literacy Skills and Activities for Librarians, Teachers, and Parents explores the six basic pre-literacy skills that experts agree are necessary for a young child to be ready to learn to read. Special sections within each chapter are dedicated to the specific needs of preschool teachers, parents, and librarians, making the content relevant to different settings. Recommended book lists, personal anecdotes, and literacy-rich activities combine to create an effective and accessible plan for implementing an early literacy program.

Learn how to use children's books during storytime to approach sensitive topics and increase children's social-emotional wellness-and how to create storytimes that are engaging, participative, and FUN! The emotional challenges many children experience consume the time of teachers, exhaust parents, and sometimes lead children toward behaviors that prohibit social and academic success. Storytime to the rescue! Library storytimes prepare children for kindergarten; storytimes at home and in preschools allow teachers, parents, and children to think and talk about empathy and the importance of honoring your own and others' feelings. In Bringing Heart and Mind into Storytime, Heather McNeil teaches librarians and teachers how to use books to open conversations with children to teach such concepts as patience, tenacity, kindness, and teamwork. McNeil shares research on brain development, social-emotional learning, and the importance of play, but she also emphasizes maintaining the fun of storytime. She recommends songs, action rhymes, games, and crafts that contribute to fun and healthy storytimes. Extensive lists of recommended books will help readers find the right ones for their audience.

This manual is a "one-stop shop" on how to present storytimes to suit different audiences including bilingual learners, special needs children, and those in a variety of settings such as Head Start, preschools, and day care situations. This beginner's guide to storytelling traces the developmental stages of very young children, illustrating how to present storytime for babies, toddlers, and preschoolers as well as in family settings to be most effective. Author Penny Peck will teach you the fundamentals of reading with the intent of capturing children's imaginations, showing you how to incorporate music, play, and hands-on activities into your routine. She offers expert advice on how to choose the best picture books and provides lists of books for addressing particular literacy needs. A perfect primer for those new to the task, this guide illustrates how to make this activity a favorite of children and provides tips for progressing in the role of storyteller, with ideas for engaging your audience and enhancing enjoyment. Beginning with the basics of performing a library storytime, each subsequent chapter builds on that knowledge, offering ways to infuse technology, special needs adaptations, and music into the story. The revised edition addresses such current topics as iPads, apps usage, online options, and dance programs.

Drawing on stories from successful programs and research, this book shows librarians how to provide students with the practical information they need for a bright future. Chapters cover career readiness, financial literacy, and civic responsibility at each grade level. From preschool through high school, students are preparing for their future. As they move through grade levels, they choose courses, research potential careers, learn about managing money, and recognize the responsibilities of being active citizens. At each step of the way, librarians can collaborate with teachers to help students to learn how to live in a world they can only imagine. School librarians are positioned to make a positive impact on students' lives when it matters most. Focusing on preparation for life after high school, this book cites research and provides anecdotes of successful programs as examples of how school librarians, in collaboration with counselors, community members, public libraries, and teachers, can develop collections and offer programming to show students the importance of finishing high school. Chapters also explain how to help students to find the college or university that fits with their educational interests and won't cause them to incur enormous debt. Included in every chapter are activities, resources, and lesson plans around topics at each grade level for librarians to co-teach with teachers, counselors, and other school staff.

Resource for those who want to share excellent children's literature with their students while improving reading skills. Extend the use of books into the content areas, meeting learning standards in English Language Arts and beyond.

This book anchors shared reading as an essential element within a comprehensive and balanced literacy program. Margaret Mooney In this book, Brenda Parkes introduces new teachers to shared reading and helps experienced teachers revitalize this important teaching practice. Starting with the bedtime story, Read It Again! outlines the essential elements and benefits of shared reading and provides detailed examples which show how a shared reading session unfolds in the classroom. By including examples of implicit and explicit teaching, Brenda demonstrates how shared reading helps children develop a range of strategies for reading and comprehending text. You will find detailed strategies that support learners in developing self-extending systems through their understanding of content and process and several examples of independent activities that consolidate and extend learning. Good book selection is the key to successful shared reading experiences. In discussing the criteria for quality book selection, Brenda shows us how to critically assess the teaching and learning possibilities in shared reading books and how to use a variety of text types to model purpose, content, and form. The book includes an analysis of supportive text features for the different needs of emergent, early, and fluent readers. Annotated bibliographies provide a quick reference to quality books. Read It Again! refines and extends our understanding of shared reading, and shows primary teachers how to put this valuable approach into practice.

This one-stop guide to nurturing six core early literacy skills at your library also offers practical tips for sharing these skills with parents, teachers, and other caregivers so they can institute them in playgroups, in school, or at home. Though libraries have been presenting early literacy activities for decades, library staff may lack an in-depth understanding of early literacy skills and their place in preparing children for a lifetime of learning. Based on the program "6 by 6: Ready to Read," this book is chock full of practical, everyday ideas on how you can foster the six core early literacy skills children should ideally acquire by age six. The volume begins by introducing the importance of early literacy and explaining how to start or expand an early literacy program in your library, regardless of its size. Subsequent chapters explore the six core skills and offer suggestions on how to showcase them in library programs and services. The book also includes activities that relate to each skill, suggests books that are especially useful in exploring each skill, and tells you how to create early literacy spaces. Three sets of storytime plans—one each for babies, toddlers, and preschoolers—are presented as well. Written primarily for public librarians and library staff, this guide will also be informative for parents and for educators who work with young girls and boys.

The goal of this publication is to enrich young children's lives through play. The activities will identify children's strengths and weaknesses and allow the Educator to assess each child's progress. The sections are grouped by theme. You will find additional activities at the end of each lesson, which you may want to use to help develop some of the children's less developed skills. The activities in this collection are designed for children aged 18 months to 4 years. The themes have been devided into 5 chapters. Each activity explains the curriculum area of learning, an objective of the activity followed by material and the procedure to implement the activity. The evaluation can be found at the bottom of the lesson to help you with outcomes for a positive learning experience. The themes are listed in the table of contents. The objectives of the activites are to promote socialization and to encourage children to explore the world around them. Word repetition enhances language skills. The activites will help to make the children aware of spatial relation and their recognition of living things and objects. In each lesson they will use their senses and develop gross and fine motor skills. We will promote the use of classification, grouping and matching skills. My intent with these experiences is to enhance each child's creativity. The compiling of these activities can be a great resource for Pre-school Teachers. In my experience, I have found that there are too few activities designed for our very young children. I was inspired to write this book after spending several months observing a daycare setting. My intent is to provide a rich learning environment for children and the hope that Educators and Parents will benefit in using my activities to help teach young children to develop both intellectually and physically. Acknowledgements This collection of activities is dedicated to my late mother, Stella, whose enthusiasm and advice have been invaluable. Her zest for life and her kindness has inspired me. I would also like to thank my husband Jake, for his help, ideas and unwavering support that gave me courage to continue this endeavor. A special thanks to my children Christi-Lee and Dane for their patience and willingness to be "readers." I would also like to acknowledge Kim Taylor Horeck for her steadfast support.

This practical, reader-friendly textbook for preservice and in-service early childhood education and early literacy courses provides "how-to-do-it" instructions for promoting emergent literacy in reading, writing, and arithmetic from preschool into the primary grades. Early 3 Rs answers the question: "What can I SAY and DO to give each child the best possible start on the 3 Rs?" With the strategies and materials in this book, a teacher can give personalized direct instruction in the 3 Rs to a beginner, in just a few minutes a day. The early chapters tell how to prepare a young child for reading, writing, and arithmetic. Subsequent chapters show how to give a beginner an early start on learning the 3 Rs. All strategies begin with the oral approach (from phonemic awareness to "arithme-talk") and then progress to print that is personally meaningful to a young child. Early 3 Rs: * Includes arithmetic as a component of early literacy. * Gives developmentally appropriate methods for direct teaching of the 3 Rs. * Provides scripts of what the teacher can say to promote early learning. * Helps education students in field-based classes offer personalized instruction. Early 3 Rs is written to be very reader friendly: the approach is intentionally eclectic; the writing deliberately avoids heavy theory; the goal is to provide an easy-to-use, highly practical and accessible guide for those who work in early childhood education settings.