The Candace Whitman collection provides emergent readers, their families, classroom educators, parents, day care facilitators, after school directors and extra-curricular program leaders with rich resources to develop, nurture and enhance primary language arts Standard 3 reading habits. The collection nurtures reading behaviors in that students can tell the story, look at the pictures as stories are read, and as they acquire language facility, print-sound code, word recognition, and getting to meaning abilities, model, experience and participate in reading behaviors. Therefore teachers can use color as the focus for the children talking about and expanding on the color recognition principles that govern this series. Habits and process The entire Candace Whitman collection fosters, nurtures, models, and is easily adaptable as catalysts for engaging students in their own creation of similar-themed works, thus instilling in them and inculcating in them writing habit and process. Even emergent students can do this by selecting a color, identifying the color from various old magazines, newspaper picture, and scrap materials and designing their own wordless picture books, involving them in the writing process.
Young children can also develop books using collage art as a spatial entry point.
Writing purposes and resulting genres Sharing events, telling stories Many of the books in the Candace Whitman collection are about sharing events. Narrative writing These stories are rich personal narratives students can use as a prompt for their own stories using different time periods, different locations, different characters. They can also modified for various cultures using native and English-language learner native languages and then transferring these skills to English language usage. The Candace Whitman collection involves many stories in which items are accomplished. Children can produce drawings or dictate emergent language stories detailing what one would do and how one would function and do tasks at a particular location.