Already Ready: Nurturing Writers in Preschool and Kindergarten
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From the very first chapter of this informative and inspiring book, a clear picture emerges of how even three- and four-year-olds' capacities for serious authorship can and should be supported.
- Lillian G. Katz
Coauthor of Young Investigators: The Project Approach in the Early Years
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By the time they reach preschool or kindergarten, young children are already writers. They don't have much experience, but they're filled with stories to tell and ideas to express - they want to show the world what they know and see. All they need is a nurturing teacher like you to recognize the writer at work within them. All you need to help them is Already Ready.
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Taking an exciting, new approach to working with our youngest students, Already Ready shows you how, by respecting children as writers, engaged in bookmaking, you can gently  nudge them toward a lifetime of joyful writing. Katie Wood Ray and Matt Glover guide you through fundamental concepts of early writing. Providing numerous, helpful examples of early writing - complete with transcriptions - they demonstrate how to:
- make sense of children's writing and interpret how they represent sounds, ideas, and images
- see important developmental signs in writers that you can use to help them grow further
- recognize the thinking young children engage in and discover that it's the same  thinking more experienced writers use to craft purposeful, thoughtful pieces.
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Then Ray and Glover show you how little ones can develop powerful understandings about:
- texts and their characteristics
- the writing process
- what it means to be a writer.
You'll learn how to support your writers' quest to make meaning, as they grow their abilities and refine their thinking about writing through teaching strategies such as:
- reading aloud
- working side by side with writers
- sharing children's writing.
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Writing is just one part of a busy early childhood classroom, but even in little doses, a nurturing approach can work wonders and help children connect the natural writer inside them to a life of expressing themselves on paper. Find that approach, share it with your students, and you'll discover that you don't have to get students ready to write - they're Already Ready.Â
