Reading Begins at Home is a book early childhood educators can recommend to parents. It is a straightforward account of proven ways in which parents can help their children with readingbefore they go to school. Internationally acclaimed reading authorities Dorothy Butler and Marie Clay present research-based ideas for at home instruction in beginning reading conceptsinstruction that anyone can use with little kids: parents, guardians, grandparents, or anyone else interested in nudging young readers toward a lifetime of literacy. The techniques are based on decades of exploring how young children come to read, on what they have to master to become readers, and on the relationship between a literate home and success in school. Butler and Clay describe one-to-one learning situations that occur in everyday life and describe ways they can be turned into opportunities for beginning reading instruction at home. They show how children can be gently introduced to the kind of instruction they will find at school as well as to concepts of print that will be key to success. Through immersion in high-quality books, direct instruction from adults, and simple encouragement, children can begin becoming readers. Parents need to know how to impleent these strategies at home. Reading Begins at Home can help them.
About the Author:

Dorothy Butler is a teacher, bookseller, author, and children's literature advocate known and respected throughout the world. She lives in New Zealand, where she enjoys reading as often as she can with her twenty-one grandchildren.

Marie Clay, FRSNZ, FNZPsS, FNZEI(Hon), Emeritus Professor, taught in primary schools and then at the University of Auckland where, for the next 30 years she introduced educational psychologists to ways of preventing psychological problems. She did post-graduate study in Developmental Psychology at the University of Minnesota on a Fulbright Scholarship and completed her doctorate at the University of Auckland with a thesis entitled "Emergent Literacy." Her 'Reading (and writing) Recovery' is an early literacy intervention, which is now implemented in five countries, and three languages. Literacy Lessons Designed For Individuals integrates what has been learned from that innovation with new research and theoretical advocacies. Shifts in early literacy learning can be monitored by teachers using her Observation Survey of Early Literacy Achievement in English, Spanish and French. A series of individual lessons can be delivered in those languages to about 150,000 children worldwide annually using a guidebook called Reading Recovery: Guidelines for Teachers in Training. Literacy Lessons Designed for Individuals is a similar guidebook which aims to make accelerated progress possible for a wider range of problems. Marie Clay was past-President of the International Reading Association, served on the editorial committees of professional journals, was a research consultant at home and abroad including UNESCO, chaired a Social Science Research Committee advising government on policies and research allocations, and worked internationally with problem-solving related to early intervention research and practice.