Describes the poems written by sixth grade students in response to William Carlos Williams's poem "The Dance" and Pieter Bruegel's painting "The Peasant Dance." (HTH)

Questions if it is possible that any place still exists without pressure to teach to the test. Describes one school district that has been able to do so by creating a vision that allows educators to work as professionals. (SG)

Describes how a teacher researcher invited her students to be detectives on the lookout for language and to take a critical perspective on how it varies with each speaker, purpose, and context. Suggests that educators need to be careful about how they present language varieties so that their students appreciate them as more than "quaint artifacts…

Describes a project in which preservice teachers and sixth grade students exchanged correspondence. Notes that the preservice teachers learned important things about the writing of sixth graders. Finds that the students' abilities in letter writing developed without direct instruction. (RS)

Presents a case study of a sixth grade teacher trying to increase her use of literature for language arts instruction. Shows the challenges and successes of attempting to get better at teaching. (PRA)

Explores how dialog writing, in which two participants "converse in writing," incorporates the interactive aspects of oral communication and the self-directed aspects of essay writing. Includes passages written over a year's time by a sixth grade student in a "dialogue journal" showing the development of his writing. (HTH)

Describes how, when a working writer visited a sixth-grade classroom on an ongoing basis to interact with students, the language and activities of the writing community changed in interesting and positive ways. (SR)

Describes how in the examination of a sixth-grade girl's participation in the language arts classroom that is driven by high-stakes testing and by a regimented classroom culture, the authors came to view students' approaches to literacy events as "stances" and their negotiation of their subjectivities in response to literacy events as…

Describes how one sixth-grade writing instructor successfully introduced writing conferences into the classroom. Discusses some of the problems encountered, how they were resolved, and the final procedures used for peer and teacher conferences. (HTH)

Describes the writing experiences of a group of gifted fifth and sixth grade students in the Active Learning Experiences in Resourceful Thinking (ALERT) program in Abilene, Texas. (HTH)

Discusses how research comes alive when students explore a range of alternate genres instead of writing the traditional research report. Notes that multigenre writing helps most students grow as researchers, thinkers, and writers while they develop a fundamental understanding of the different purposes for which text can be used. (SG)

Offers a critical reading of a text used in Ontario, Canada, in a province-wide sixth-grade testing program, finding it representative of a genre called "Boutique multiculturalism," which fails as literature and fails as an inclusive text because it is emptied of all specific social, cultural, and historical content. (SR)

Illuminates patterns in responses to literature by analyzing one sixth grader's entries written in her literature response journal. Finds that the student's responses reveal her as an active reader and writer with unique thoughts, feelings. and opinions generated by quality children's literature. (MG)

Observes four sixth graders composing nonfiction projects for an integrated unit on Canadian studies, using hypermedia. Ponders issues raised when students compose in hypermedia including evaluating nontraditional projects, developing a sense of audience, conventions of the medium, use of visuals to convey information, engaged students, and…

Finds that the 35 middle-school language-arts teachers studied agreed that Self Selected Reading (SSR) is an important way to improve students' reading attitudes and achievement, but that their schools rarely provided funds for buying student-preferred materials, and that finding time for SSR was difficult because of the pressure to prepare for…