Book excerpt: This book offers pre-school teachers, kindergarten teachers, daycare workers, and parents ways to help young children begin to read and write, by placing stories at the very center of the early childhood curriculum. The book includes an in-depth discussion of the crucial pedagogical and developmental roles that stories can play in early childhood education, as well as a practical guide to having children tell their own stories and perform them with their classmates. The book also discusses the use of videos, and the uses and misuses of Whole Language, invented spelling, and the writing process. Chapters in the book are: (1) Stories in Search of Classrooms; (2) Lessons from Home; (3) What I Had to Learn about Stories in Classrooms; (4) When Young Children Dictate and Dramatize Their Own Stories; (5) Portraits of Young Storytellers; and (6) A Guide to Storytelling in the Classroom. Appendixes present sample stories dictated to teachers, sample transcripts of dictation, a list of books and stories children like to dramatize, and brief descriptions of related classroom literacy activities. (RS)