Making Words Kindergarten: 50 Interactive Lessons that Build Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, and Spelling Skills [Paperback]

Patricia M. Cunningham

The day I entered first grade, I decided I wanted to teach first grade. In 1965, I graduated from the University of Rhode Island and began my teaching career teaching first grade in Key West, Florida. For the next several years, I taught a variety of grades and worked as a curriculum coordinator and special reading teacher in Florida and Indiana.

 

From the very beginning, I worried about children who struggled learning to read and devised a variety of alternative strategies to teach them to read. In 1974, I received my Ph. D. in Reading Education from the University of Georgia. I developed the Making Words activity while working with Title One teachers in North Carolina where I was the Director of Reading for Alamance County Schools. I have been the Director of Elementary Education at Wake Forest University in Winston Salem, North Carolina since 1980 and have worked with numerous teachers to develop hands-on engaging ways to teach phonics and spelling. In 1991, I published Phonics they Use: Words for Reading and Writing, which is currently available in its fourth edition. Along with Richard Allington, I published Classrooms that Work and Schools that Work.

 

Dottie Hall and I have worked together on many projects. In 1989, we began developing the Four Blocks Framework, a comprehensive approach to literacy which is used in many schools in the United States and Canada. Dottie Hall and I have  worked together to produce many books, including the first Making Words books and the Month by Month Phonicslƒ.