Teaching Reading Organically in the Early Childhood Classroom: Using the Key Vocabulary Approaches of Sylvia Ashton-Warner

This book offers pre-service and practicing teachers the tools, materials, teaching strategies, and theoretical understandings to implement an organic reading program for beginning readers. Utilizing the work of Sylvia Ashton-Warner and field research carried out in nine multi-age early childhood classrooms, the book advocates for organic teaching methods to promote children’s love of reading and life-long literacy. Written in a narrative style, each chapter describes teaching strategies that are easily accessible and includes real-life classroom examples to make the implementation of an organic primary literacy program clear. With this approach, the book seeks to instill the desire and appreciation for reading; validates how books nurture and inform our lives; provides the tools and the skills to decode unknown words (word analysis skills); confirms how language is integral not only to reading but also to other language arts, such as spelling, word definitions, comprehension, reading aloud, and speaking; and provides the means for readers to make intelligent interpretations of text, from what is on the surface to those underlying meanings. This is a key resource for pre-service teachers and teacher educators in early literacy and early childhood curriculum courses, as well as reading specialists and students seeking teaching certification.