Cognates are words that are the same or nearly the same orthographically and semantically in English and Spanish. The majority of the more than 20,000 cognates are academic vocabulary words comprised of Latin and Greek roots and affixes. Several thousand cognates can be found in the picture books that have earned the Américas Book Award, which was…

Literary journeys expand readers' intellectual and emotional worlds, helping them gain understanding of global situations and insight into the human condition. The "here" they know becomes broader through outstanding international literature. When choosing books for the 2011 United States Board on Books for Young People (USBBY)…

While conducting a content analysis of award-winning, middle school fiction, I indentified a number of episodes and characters that might be used as models for students' writing. Research suggests that teachers can motivate students (Bruning & Horn, 2000; Codling, Gambrell, Kennedy, Palmer, & Graham, 1996) to respond to character-writers (Van…

Teachers put much effort into selecting books and planning literature activities that will engage their students. On reflection, the author recognized a need to give students more freedom to choose what to read. Research shows that "when students were provided opportunities to select which text(s) they would read for a given topic or unit,…