′In reading this book practitioners may be able to gain a vast repertoire of activities that supports the young literate in their classroom. This practical guide demonstrates how one might go about teaching the vital sub-skills of emergent literacy development in authentic and purposeful ways′ -Andrew Sinko, Educate ′This is more than an excellent text book for early years practitioners and students, it is a delight! Tina Bruce and Jenny Spratt have managed to combine authoritative insights about language, literacy and child development with a celebration of the rich poetic resources of the English language. The authors explain the essentials of literacy in terms of children′s earliest experiences of human relationships and communication, physical movement, symbol making and using, play, conversations, the sounds and rhythms of language and high well-being. Bruce and Spratt go on to describe a rich resource of time-honoured traditional material that is just waiting to be used in language play and experimentation and literacy learning and teaching. This celebration of action songs, finger rhymes, nursery rhymes, stories and poetry and the provision of carefully annotated photographs make this a very special book. The text empowers practitioners (and the children they nurture and teach) as it explains the complexity of literacy learning, clarifies linguistic technical jargon and emphasises the joy and creativity of good literacy learning experiences. This is a book to keep close to hand and it is the perfect antidote to the misguided notion that ′reading is simple′!′ - Marian Whitehead