SUPPORTING LITERACY DEVELOPMENT IN YOUNG CHILDREN
This volume of preschool activities attempts to form a comprehensive and cohesive framework that brings together theory, research, and practice across diverse disciplines: early literacy and language development, early childhood, and early childhood special education. Theory and research as well as actual classroom practices guided the development of the activities. Similarly, theoretical foundations as well as ideas for practical applications are presented in this volume for users to make their own and adapt to their particular circumstances. Following is a description of the major features of the curriculum (see Table 1 for an overview of these features). [note: no table 1 in this excerpt.]

General Knowledge Features
This volume provides teachers and parents with knowledge and skills in four areas: 1) understanding the development of literacy in young children, 2) providing a literacy-rich physical environment in the home and school, 3) promoting early literacy through child-responsive teaching strategies, and 4) assessing children's literacy development in developmentally appropriate ways.

• Knowledge about literacy development--Information is provided on child development and applications of emergent literacy research to the curriculum to ensure thorough understanding of the processes involved in the development of literacy in young children.
  
  
• Literacy-rich physical environment--The curriculum provides recommendations for materials, activities, room arrangements, and organizations of daily routines that support children's literacy experiences in the home and at school. These include listening to storybook readings, participating in structured writing center activities, and visiting the classroom library.
  
  
• Adult-child interaction--The curriculum provides teachers and parents with information on the use of child-responsive teaching strategies, drawn from the social-interactionist research (Diaz, Neal, & Vachio, 1991; Pellegrini, Perlmutter, Galda, & Brody, 1990; Snow, 1983; Wertsch, 1985). Some of these strategies have been used successfully in early intervention programs (Mahoney & Powell, 1988) to facilitate mother-child interaction and early language development of children with disabilities. Examples of child-responsive teaching strategies include varying levels of task demands and support in response to the child's level of competence in a task, facilitating language through information-talk, expanding on the child's utterance, asking open-ended questions, following the child's lead, and taking turns.
  
  
• Assessment of early literacy--The curriculum provides developmentally appropriate and ecological procedures for teachers and parents to assess young children's early literacy learning, such as informal observations, structured performance samples (e.g., Teale, 1988), and a checklist.

Activity Features

• Ecologically sensitive- This volume emphasizes the importance of providing children with a broad literacy-rich environment (i.e., physical and social) both at home and at school. Teaching is activity based (Bricker & Cripe, 1992), with literacy skills encouraged within meaningful everyday life activities.
  
  
• Developmentally appropriate--Activities encourage children to experience and experiment with literacy activities by reconstructing meanings of books and events through their own words and expressing their own ideas and stories.
  
  
• Responsive to individual differences--Activities are designed specifically to respond to the particular needs of young children with a variety of disabilities. The social-interactionist perspective of our curriculum and, in particular, the use of scaffolding (Wood, Bruner, & Ross, 1976) provide a framework for addressing the variety of individual needs experienced by children with disabilities who are learning together with their typically developing peers.

The activities immerse children in an authentic literate environment. The emergent literacy experiences that have been associated with school success are introduced not as isolated segments but through a series of activities in which each child can participate and learn at his or her individual level of functioning. To facilitate learning, activities include developmentally appropriate teaching strategies. Adults can provide different levels of assistance, arrange tasks and situations, and match the goals of the interaction with the individual child's understanding of the tasks (Wertsch, 1985).

The teaching strategies and adaptations for specific needs of children with disabilities are guided by the notion of scaffolding (Wood et al., 1976), a dynamic type of adult-child interaction in which the adult provides high levels of support and low demands to assist the performance of a child who is less competent (see Figure 1 in Chapter 2). Researchers have identified a number of adult interactive behaviors that positively affect children's literacy and language outcomes (Morrow, 1989). These include strategies such as questioning, giving information, clarifying and restating information, expanding on the child's utterances, and offering praise and feedback. These strategies have also been used to facilitate language in young children with disabilities (Fey, 1986). Use of these approaches allows for individualization in a child-responsive manner, making the curriculum ideal for use in an inclusive program in which children of many ability levels may be grouped in the same classroom.

• Multiculturally sensitive--Literacy is deeply embedded in the culture of the family and the community (Heath, 1982; Sulzby & Teale, 1991). This volume offers literacy activities that are meaningful across and within a variety of cultures and ethnic groups and that address the issue of culture-specific adult-child interaction styles.
  
  
• Grounded in research theory--Effective implementation of any curriculum depends on a solid understanding by the users of the philosophy and principles on which it is founded (Adams, 1990). Each teaching activity is accompanied by relevant theoretical and empirical information to enable users to understand the purpose of each activity.

The following features enable teachers and parents to use the activities in a variety of settings and with children at different stages of literacy development:

• Useful in group instruction; adaptable to heterogeneous groups--The curriculum is designed to ensure that children of different ability levels can be served in inclusive groupings. Each experience includes activities for a range of developmental levels so that teachers can respond to individual differences.
  
  
• Supports that can be integrated with other curricula--Ladders to Literacy will enhance rather than replace existing curricula. This makes the curriculum flexible and easy to include with classroom curricula and routines.
  
  
• Activities that are developmentally appropriate--Activities are functional and meaningful for the child and facilitate behaviors in multiple areas. Each educational activity identifies a developmental sequence of activities to accommodate children of different developmental levels.
  
  
• Provision of guidelines for child-responsive teaching strategies--For each activity, guidelines for teaching strategies are described to facilitate children's participation and to allow for adjustments of demands and support according to the child's level of task competence. o Provision of suggestions for including families-A series of activities are available specifically for use by parents and other family members.
  
  
• Provision of recommendations for individualized family service plan/individualized education program goals and objectives--The educational activities contain examples of child behaviors that can be expected to be facilitated during the activity. This is to assist teachers and parents in identifying goals and objectives. o Inclusion of formal and informal assessment procedures-Guidelines are recommended for using portfolios to document children's progress. Informal assessment procedures, observation forms, and checklists are proposed to assist teachers in determining children's progress toward specific objectives.

The activities in this volume have been extensively field-tested over a 4-year period in a variety of preschool settings, including child development programs, Head Start programs, and early childhood special education classrooms. Sites included an inclusive child development center serving primarily Caucasian middle-class children; a multicultural program in an Islamic School; two Head Start programs, one attended primarily by African American children and the other primarily by Native American children; and self-contained special education preschools in public schools attended by children from a variety of cultural backgrounds and presenting a broad range of disabilities. A total of 26 teachers and teaching assistants participated in the field-testing. The professional training of the teachers ranged from a child development associate to a master's degree in early childhood special education. Most teachers implemented each activity at least once.

Generally, activities such as Storybook Reading, Snack/Lunch Menus, Journals, and Morning/Afternoon Message took place daily. Activities such as Show and Tell and Musical Activities took place weekly, whereas activities that required more intensive planning and materials preparation (e.g., Long Jump, Following Recipes, Making Maps) were implemented only once during the school year. Teachers reported that they liked the activities and found them developmentally appropriate, culturally sensitive, and easy to include within their daily classroom routines.

To meet the needs of heterogeneous groups of children, the activities in this volume were designed for participation by children functioning across a range of levels typical of inclusive settings. In one particular study, we explored the effects of conducting activities on the early language and literacy development of young children with disabilities, children at risk, and typically developing children (Notari-Syverson et al., 1996). Overall, all children benefited from participation in the activities. Children at risk and children with disabilities in particular made significant gains on standardized and nonstandardized measures of early literacy and expressive and receptive language.

(Notari-Skyverson, A., O'Connor, R.E., & Vadasy, P.F. (1998). Ladders to Literacy: A Preschool Activity Book. (pp. 5-9). Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co. (#3173; $49.95); toll-free telephone: 1-800-638-3775; fax: 410-337-8539; web site: www.brookespublishing.com).