Margaretta Schurz established the first German Kindergarten in Wisconsin in 1855 and Elizabeth Peabody established the first English Kindergarten and training school in Boston in 1860 (Sadker and Sadker, 2000). Like Froebel, Marie Clay a current educational leader uses some hands on activities to help promote reading in low achieving first graders. Marie M. Clay was born in 1926 in Wellington, New Zealand. She earned a primary teacher’s certificate in 1945 from the Wellington College of Education and a Bachelor of Arts degree at the Wellington campus of the University of New Zealand. After her completion of her master’s thesis, “Teaching of Reading to Special Class Children,” she was awarded a Master of Arts degree with honors in 1948. In 1950 Clay went to the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Welfare to study developmental psychology and clinical child development. She then went back to Wanganui in New Zealand to continue teaching in the primary grades. Because of her interest in and expertise with children with special needs, many high-need students were placed in her class (Gaffney and Askew, 1999). For the next twenty-five years, Clay was involved in the training of school psychologists at the University of Auckland. In her doctoral dissertation, Emergent Reading Behaviors, Clay asked the question, ”Can we see the process of learning to read going off-course close to the onset of instruction?” (Reading Recovery in North America, 2000). She described the week-by week progress of one hundred children during their first year of school. From her research she was able to write An Observation Survey of Early Literacy Achievement, which includes reliable observation tolls for the assessment and analysis of consequential changes over time in children’s early literacy learning (Gaffney and Askew, 1999). “If children are apparently unable to learn, we should assume ...
