Basics & Bookshelf for
Early Childhood Students
Snow et al.’s seminal book Preventing Reading Difficulties
in Young Children1, published by the National Research
Council (NRC), emphasizes that the majority of reading
difficulties faced by adolescents and adults result from
problems that could have been resolved in early
childhood. In recognition of the research results
generated by the NRC, the National Institute for Literacy
has published a manuscript entitled Putting Reading First:
Helping Your Child Learn to Read2 (2001),
which highlights the preschool and kindergarten level
early language skills essential for ongoing success in
school. Some of these highlighted skills include:

•  Language usage,
•  Listening and responding to stories,
•  Recognizing and naming alphabet letters,
•  Listening to the sounds of spoken language,
•  Connecting sounds to letters to figure out the “code” of
reading,
•  Learning and using new words,
•  Understanding what is read.
Resources:

1 Snow, C.E., Burns, M.S., and Griffin, P (Eds.) (1998) Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children.
Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.
2 _______2001 Putting Reading First: Helping your child learn to read. Washington, D.C.: The Partnership
for Reading through the National Institute for Literacy (NIFL) and The National Institute of Child Health and
Human Development (NICHD), U.S. Department of Education.
3 Tallal, P., Miller, S., Byma, G., Wang, X., Nagarajan, S.S., Schreiner, C., Jenkins, W.M., and Merzenich,
M.M. (1996). Language comprehension in language-learning impaired children improved with acoustically
modified speech. Science, 271, 81-84.
The Research Behind
Basics
Literacy specialists and speech-language pathologists have
long recognized the importance of preschool-level language
skills for academic success. Many professionals who work
with young school-aged children are familiar with the
cognitive skill building programs designed by the
neuroscientists at Scientific Learning, which enable
children five years and older to build these requisite
language skills through intensive short-term computerized
language and reading intervention.

As the National Institute for Literacy publication
demonstrates, most education agencies now recognize and
support early language intervention that enables young
children to enter school with the language skills needed to
succeed.
Basics and  Bookshelf  provide preschool activities and experiences that build all of the skills
recognized as essential by the National Institute for Literacy. The programs can be administered as
an intensive, short-term program with children as young as three years old. With the recognition
that acoustically modified speech can accelerate the speed and efficacy of treatment of childhood
language problems3, the preschool professional can now combine these two programs to create a
comprehensive language remediation program. Combined, these programs train the pre-requisite
skills for the Language,  Language to Reading, Literacy, and Literacy Advanced programs shown to
be highly effective and used with thousands of children nationwide.

Anecdotal results where Basics and  Bookshelf were successfully used to train and facilitate the
treatment of speech and language problems in preschool-aged children. Results suggest the
following improvements may be observed after intensive intervention administered for at least 30
minutes daily for six to ten weeks:

Significant increases in receptive and expressive language skills;
Significant improvement in phonological awareness skills; and
Successful pre-training for more comprehensive cognitive skill programs for preschoolers,
children learning English as a second language, or children on the autism spectrum.

The intervention protocol incorporates the list of goals provided in Putting Reading First and has
successfully been used in preschool programs throughout the country.