It is now well known that linguistically interactive experiences with stories during the preschool years develop the child's knowledge about written language, along with abilities to construct meaning from literary forms of language. Storytime as a literacy activity in school is just beginning to be explored. It appears that there are ways of eliciting and interpreting children's implicit responses to stories which positively affect their thinking, understanding, and sensitivity about literature. In turn, these responses strengthen the foundation of the kind of critical reading abilities necessary for the continuation of literacy development. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether a teacher reading selected books and practicing specific teacher interaction behaviors during group storytime would increase the critical responses about literature from a group of children. A pretest-posttest nonequivalent group design was used. Subjects were two intact groups of upper middle class kindergarten children who attended either morning or afternoon sessions in the same school with the same teacher. The researcher read the treatment group ten different stories, one per day, over the period of ten days. During this time, the researcher practiced specific teacher interaction behaviors with the group. For the same period of time, the researcher read random books to the nontreatment group and did not practice specific teacher interaction behaviors. The comments and questions arising from three pretest storytimes and three posttest storytimes for each group were coded according to an author-adapted matrix instrument composed of ten literary elements and four levels of knowledge. The children in the treatment group gave significantly more critical responses than the children in the nontreatment group. Qualitative observations during the study indicated the need to develop means of identifying and evaluating behaviors of both teachers and children related to literature and literacy learning. / Education, Faculty of / Language and Literacy Education (LLED), Department of / Graduate

The reasons for this study are to try to determine what the rest needs of the kindergarten child are and to investigate the effects of different types of rest periods on the behavior of five year olds in a morning kindergarten. It is hoped that the information gained from this study will be of help to kindergarten teachers in determining the type of rest period best suited to the needs of the children that they teach. / Advisor: Sarah Lou Hammond, Professor Directing Paper. / Typescript. / "August, 1954." / "Submitted to the Graduate Council of Florida State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts." / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 35-36).

The author will deal with reading readiness in the following ways: Information found in the pedagogical literature, ways of appraising readiness for reading, and suggested activities for a reading readiness program. / Typescript. / "August, 1957." / "Submitted to the Graduate Council of Florida State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science." / Advisor: Marian W. Black, Professor Directing Paper. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 26-27).

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