The purpose of this article is to describe a strategy called the Poetry Academy used to boost reading skills in elementary school students. The Poetry Academy paired struggling readers with a community volunteer to read poetry on a weekly schedule to practice fluency, work on word recognition abilities, and build confidence. A research study took…

Shares the experiences of children's author Gary Soto interacting with children while visiting schools for Author's Day. (SR)

Traditional literacy practices and educational policymakers define reading as a process of vocabulary recognition and print-based decoding. This perspective is especially prevalent in the primary-grade literacy classroom. Yet, a growing movement sees literacy encompassing not only printed text, but a wide range of cultural, technological, and…

In the author's experience, a significant source of reading difficulty for many beginning and struggling readers are misconceptions about print concepts so basic teachers assume their students are aware of them. Many children fail to grasp implicit principles of print such as the following: the reader cannot make up the words, the order of letters…

The ability to draw conclusions while reading is an important comprehension skill. It requires readers to connect background knowledge and experiences with information in the text in order to go beyond the literal meaning of words on the page. Even with careful teaching, this skill, like most others, needs to be reinforced at different levels of…

An innovative, technology-enabled elementary school literacy program was implemented in a large urban school district. The program revolved around having student-adult pen pals read the same books and correspond about them. Statistical comparisons showed that program classrooms outperformed students in comparison classrooms on the SAT-9…

Skilled reading requires attention to many aspects of print at the same time. Some children demonstrate difficulty in attending flexibly to multiple features of print, often focusing solely on decoding or word-level information. These children often lack the insight that reading is more than decoding; they have a difficult time thinking about…

Many approaches to literacy instruction treat language as an object of study. The curricular assumptions that inform such instruction are that language is located outside the person, extracted from context, neutral, and explicable through defined rules. An underlying assumption in many language arts classrooms is that children will not pay…

Reports that neither residual nor crude gain methods were more effective in measuring reading improvement gain at the elementary level. (TO)

Discusses the problems that arise when elementary school students try to read words that are common in their speech. (RB)

Suggests that a partial cause of student reading difficulty may be lack of comprehension of the process of reading and proposes that teacher explanation might help solve the problem. (RW)

Examines elementary students' reading preferences, habits, and behaviors. Reveals four powerful influences on elementary students' motivation to read: prior experiences with books, social interactions about books, book access, and book choice. (SR)

Describes several youth features (special newspaper supplements in daily newspapers around the United States that publish student writing) sponsored by the Newspapers in Education program. (SR)

Through basic literacy experiences like discussing, reading, writing, viewing, and listening, students become aware of themselves as readers, increase reading abilities, and demonstrate an overall understanding of "just right" books in an environment very different from the usual activity-filled elementary classroom. Amazingly, because of basic…

The Word Writing CAFE is a new assessment tool designed for teachers to evaluate objectively students' word-writing ability for fluency, accuracy, and complexity. It is designed to be given to the whole class at one time. This article describes the development of the CAFE and provides directions for administering and scoring it. The author also…