What Early Literacy Skills are Taught?
Stepping Stones consists of one Lesson Book and a separate section on serial rapid automatic naming (activities that provide children practice making quick visual-verbal associations of known sets of colors, numbers, and/or letter names in a left-to-right format). Instructional prompts are provided in both English and Spanish. During short daily lessons of 15-20 minutes (i.e., total of 9 to 15 total hours of instruction depending upon the individual learning rates of children, ) individual or small groups (n = 2 to 3) of children are guided by an educator through a set of instructional activities designed to promote children’s print awareness, alphabet knowledge, phonological awareness, and serial rapid automatic naming skills. These skills have been found to be the best school-entry predictors of how well children will learn to read during the first two years of instruction (e.g., NRP, 2000). Additional instructional activities are used in the initial 14 instructional sessions to prom