Provides sources of aid and encouragement for parents of children of all ages who want to help their children develop positive attitudes toward reading and sharpen their reading skills. (FL)

Offers five guidelines for teaching slow readers: (1) use age-appropriate content; (2) build background and highlight key concepts; (3) keep assignments short; (4) focus on only a few skills and strategies; and (5) practice the chosen objectives to achieve success. (MG)

Presents brief annotations of 25 outstanding books for children and young adults, published in 1997, that are culturally authentic, rich in cultural details, and that celebrate both diversity and the common bonds of humanity. (SR)

Offers a brief historical perspective on Latino folk literature. Discusses 26 recently published books for children and adolescents in both English and Spanish, organized into origin tales, tales based on historical facts, trickster tales, and cumulative tales. Describes activities to use with these books to foster literacy and make powerful…

Book leveling, a way to organize texts to match them with readers, has been widely implemented in primary classrooms. This article questions whether the often excessive attention to leveling leads to the neglect of other factors that influence the reader-text match. The authors present findings from a small study that aimed to determine the…

The readability level of 52 picture books was analyzed, and it was learned that the levels ranged from grade one to grade seven. (MKM)

A study used a Functions of Reading Scale to explore the reading activities of students in grades three, five, and eight in Ireland and the United States. Results showed the patterns of relationships between the variables in the Scale to be consistent across cultures and grade levels. (FL)

Provides a rationale for organizing history instruction around children's trade books. Presents a sample unit on the American Revolution that has been used successfully with intermediate-grade students. Describes an approach that is unique in its dual focus on students' affective responses to literature and their learning of content. (MG)

Outlines one struggling second-grade reader's abilities and reading strategies, and initial instructional efforts with her. Discusses how the author determined a mismatch existed between her teaching, the teaching materials, and the child. Shows how a change of materials--to the use of decodable text accompanied by reflective, systematic,…

Describes 13 practical ideas for classroom teaching at the elementary level, including writing classmates' biographies, keeping a class diary, and improving emergent readers' vocabulary with word cards. (MM)

Reports on the observation of a group of kindergartners in their classroom library twice a week for eight weeks to learn more about how the nature of the texts--familiarity, predictability, and size--influence the children's use of books. (NH)

Surveys 254 teachers in Texas and Kansas to determine their favorite books for reading aloud to children. Shows that their preferences included twice as many male protagonists as female and that these males were portrayed more positively than the females. (FL)

Offers a 69-item list of children's books published in 1996 or 1997 that are suitable for kindergarten and first-grade children in helping them develop phonemic awareness. Offers a letter to parents that describes some specific activities they can do at home that highlight phonemic awareness. Offers a parents' phonemic awareness observation…

Outlines diverse strategies (contextual clues, palindromes, figurative language/idioms, etc.) for increasing vocabulary skills of gifted readers in the lower primary grades, using children's literature to supplement good tradebooks. (NKA)

Argues that classroom teachers must take the responsibility of preparing students to live in a pluralistic society and must become aware of cultural and linguistic diversity in the country and the world. (FL)