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.

Selma Wassermann is Professor Emerita in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. She is the author of more than 30 academic texts and assorted classroom curriculum materials. She is the proud recipient of the University Award for Teaching Excellence.