Teacher's Guide for Read, Play, and Learn!®

This detailed Teacher's Guide for the Read, Play, and Learn!® curriculum helps teachers and program directors in choosing materials, arranging their classrooms, using the curriculum to enhance children's skills, and identifying children's developmental levels so that appropriate modifications can be made. Key features include:

• Discussion of research on emergent literacy with specific suggestions on how teachers can use the activities in Read, Play, and Learn! to support learning and skill acquisition in their students. There are also guidelines on creating a literacy-rich environment in the classroom and creating opportunities for reading and writing. An appendix contains a list of suggested materials for each stage of literacy development.
• Descriptions of the three levels of learning—sensorimotor, functional, and symbolic—with guidelines on how teachers can identify a child's learning level and modify classroom activities to meet his or her individual needs. There are also suggestions on how teachers can use curriculum activities to encourage each child's cognitive, social-emotional, communication, and sensorimotor development, no matter their level of learning.
• An entire chapter devoted to ways you can involve families in their children's education, including photocopiable handouts teachers can give to parents that describe the curriculum and ways parents can support their children's learning.
• Master planning sheets to help teachers plan activities for each center and learning area for an entire week.
• List of resources on accommodations and curricula for early childhood classrooms.
• Suggestions on how to get your classroom ready to use Read, Play, and Learn!, with descriptions of each of the centers and guidelines for arranging the classroom and planning a daily schedule.
• List of materials recommended for each center and learning area.
• Chapters on adapting the curriculum for students with visual or hearing impairments.

This Teacher's Guide is part of Read, Play, and Learn!, an innovative, play-based curriculum for children 3–6 years of age that promotes general development and boosts cognitive, sensorimotor, communication/language, social, and emerging literacy skills. The curriculum includes a series of 16 instructional modules, each designed around a popular storybook.

These Read, Play, and Learn! modules are available separately:

1. The Kissing Hand, by Audrey Penn (no longer available)
2. Somebody and the Three Blairs, by Marilyn Tolhurst
3. Picking Apples & Pumpkins, by Amy and Richard Hutchings
4. The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything, by Linda Williams
5. The Knight and the Dragon, by Tomie dePaola
6. Abiyoyo, by Pete Seeger
7. Night Tree, by Eve Bunting
8. The Snowy Day, by Ezra Jack Keats Collection

These Read, Play, and Learn! modules are available separately, or as Collection 2:

9. A Porcupine Named Fluffy, by Helen Lester
10. First Flight, by David McPhail
11. Friends, by Helme Heine
12. The Three Billy Goats Gruff, by Janet Stevens
13. The Three Little Javelinas, by Susan Lowell
14. A Rainbow of Friends, by P.K. Hallinan
15. Franklin Has a Sleepover, by Paulette Bourgeois and Brenda Clark
16. The Rainbow Fish, by Marcus Pfister