Introduction -page 3

At about one-year of age, most children begin speaking in "one-word-sentences" formed with labels and words that are high in meaning and emotion.  Once children can speak about 50 words, new words are learned more quickly and easily and children start to combine descriptive words and verbs with nouns to form two-word phrases.  As two-word speech expands to three words, children start to use high-frequency words (in, on, a, the, etc.) as "grammatical glue" to link words and connect phrases.   By three-years of age, most children can use gestures, words, phrases, and sentences to carry on a face to face conversation.  Between the ages of five and nine, many children move from a dependence on pictures and environmental clues to comprehend books and conversations to comprehending and visualizing words and stories without the aid of pictures.

After the introduction of only two sounds ("P" and short "U"), Animated-Literacy starts to revisit and reinforce the "one-word" stage of language development.  After hearing books about "pups,"  students learn to draw and label a pup.  With the introduction of each new sound, letter, or letter pattern, one or more drawing and labeling lessons is introduced.  The Draw To Read And Write Book provides explicit, systematic, synthetic phonics instruction through the use of a sequence of decodable labels that are combined with high-frequency words to form phrases and sentences. Once students have experienced success at labeling drawings with single words, they progress to the two-word stage of language development.  Here students read and write phrases and short sentences that describe the parts of their drawings and tell how the parts might move.

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