Reading, Writing, and Your First Grader PARENTS: Before we present a selection of poems and stories for your child, we want to address you directly. This section, Reading, Writing, and Your First Grader, is intended to help you understand how children are--or should be--taught to read and write in a good first-grade classroom, and to suggest a few ways that you can help at home. The first section below, Teaching Children to Read: The Need for a Balanced...

Presents a comprehensive guide for parents and teachers to help them prepare for the fifth grade; and covers topics including literature and language usage, world and American history and geography, visual arts, music, math, and science.

The best way to nurture your child's reading and writing abilities is to provide rich literary experiences and find frequent and varied opportunities to work and play with language. By the end of second grade, children have developed a reading vocabulary of familiar words and can decode the letter-sound patterns of many unfamiliar one- and two- syllable words. During third grade, as they increase their knowledge about words (including the concepts...