Children playing. That’s often what we think of and hear about when we talk about early childhood education. But when researchers Lillard et al. (2013) examined the relationship between pretend play and learning, they could not find evidence that pretend play caused any significant development
One way to build a more equitable and just society is to help students master the foundational skills that beget fluent reading. Once fluent, students are able to access all types of text, especially ones of personal interest. In turn, fluency and text choice motivate older readers, leading to greater reading volume and
April is National Poetry Month -- but please don’t relegate poems to only one month! Rather, use them all year long to get kids excited about language and to build foundational literacy skills. Poems can be used to teach fluency, vocabulary, phonic patterns, text structure, speaking and listening, author study, and comprehension. Most children find poems engaging and enjoy reading, writing, and presenting them. Perhaps this is due to the brevity, rhythms, and rhymes of poems, as
Contributed by Nettie Becker Early childhood educators are encouraged as never before. Political leaders are beginning to pay attention to the problem these educators have been talking about for years. In New York City, pre-school programs have enrolled over 75,000 children in its second year of