Mary Hohmann

The high prairie is a hidden world above a winding river valley in the foothills of the Rockies. You cannot see it from the riverbed below. When the valley lies under a dense mat of fog, several thousand feet upward, blue sky and bright sun bathe this prairie grassland. From the high prairie, you can see snow-covered mountain peaks many miles away. This book of poetry shows how it is possible to live above the valley of this life with its tragedies and failures by choosing the view from the high prairie.

Poems from the High Prairie

High/Scope distributed product-Endorsed by the High/Scope Early Childhood Reading Institute, this book focuses on phonemic awareness-the ability to recognize the smallest sound units that make up words-identified by reading experts as an essential skill that prepares children for reading. The 130 phonemic awareness activities included in the book are suitable for small-group learning in preschools, prekindergarten programs, Head Start programs, child care centers, and home-based programs. The activities are based on the latest scientific evidence about what children need to become confident and successful readers and writers. They also reflect the research-based, classroom-tested, and internationally recognized teaching strategies of the High/Scope early childhood approach. The activities fall into five content categories: identifying sounds, building rhyme awareness, building alliteration awareness, recognizing letters, and developing letter-sound awareness. The book offers more than enough activities to meet the standard of 20 hours of phonemic awareness practice recommended for all preschool children by the National Reading Panel and endorsed by the U. S. Department of Education.

130 Prereading Activities for Preschoolers

Fee, Fie, Phonemic Awareness

David P. Weikart

Divided into three parts, this book reviews the basic concepts of the High/Scope preschool curriculum and its development, implementation, and effectiveness. The introduction offers a retrospective of the program's history, describes the five basic principles that form the framework of the approach, and discusses some of the reasons for its effectiveness. Part 1 analyzes the core idea in the development of the High/Scope curriculum--active learning. The concept of active learning is discussed in several contexts: as an essential ingredient for learning, as a basis for how adults can create a supportive social climate, and as a foundation for working with the families or working as a team to make the active learning process effective in a particular setting with a particular group of children. Part 2 discusses methods for creating an environment that promotes active learning. It suggests selecting and arranging materials from which children can choose, and manipulating and developing the daily routine so children have many opportunities to initiate, plan, carry out, and discuss their actions and ideas. Part 3 introduces 58 key experiences that can guide adults while they plan activities to support development in creative representation, language and literacy, initiative and social relations, movement, music, classification, seriation, number, space, and time. Each chapter includes a list of references and related readings. (AA)

Mary Hohmann

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