This article describes two educational settings in Nigeria where teachers adapted a language experience approach for reading and writing instruction. The first setting is a professional development workshop for public school teachers of students in grades 1-6. The second setting includes two groups of students with special needs: a grade 6 class…

Two struggling fourth-grade readers with learning disabilities who have severe deficits in word recognition, comprehension, and reading fluency improve their reading skills using a method that combines intensive word study with the timed repeated reading of poetry. The direct instruction included semantics, morphology, orthography, and…

Teachers often miss opportunities to use their classroom computers as teaching partners because of a lack of knowledge or confidence about how the computers can support learning. Internet-connected computers can enable teachers to access well-designed websites that support literacy instruction and involve students in interactive responses to…

The authors provide teachers with a rationale for engaging students in independent reading using a differentiated approach. By profiling types of readers, sharing observational tools, and offering teaching suggestions for each type of reader the authors give practical suggestions to facilitate reading engagement and make independent reading more…

This article features an overview of two case studies, each featuring a successful literacy coach and the context of the urban elementary school in which she worked. The article describes improvements in reading and writing instruction and improvements in overall school culture that study participants attributed to the influence of these coaches.…

Paraphrasing, somewhat different from retelling and summarizing, helps students monitor their understanding and incorporate new knowledge with what they already know about a topic. Paraphrasing helps students realize that comprehension is the goal of reading.

What kinds of books do children want to read? And how can a teacher find those books? The author provides some ideas for interesting new books in the categories of graphic novels, humorous adventures, poetry, and books about math.

In this paper, we discuss a creative role-play approach to the use of think-alouds focused on exploring multiple perspectives. The teaching idea presented here draws on transformative and critical theory in education and research-based practices. It encourages children to see the world through the eyes of diverse fictional characters or, in the…

Does fluency need to be an instructional precursor to comprehension? The perceived causal relationship between the two may in fact translate into the creation of word-calling students who can read with adequate speed and expression, but cannot retell story events or make inferences. A discussion of fluency's relationship to comprehension provides…

The children's literature market has experienced enormous growth in recent years, providing teachers with an abundance of resources with which to teach reading. High-quality informational texts abound. Yet, teachers often are uncertain about how to select appropriate informational texts to use with younger readers when including them in…

Concepts of museum literacies are introduced in this report. Information is presented for how museum literacies were initiated, designed, and produced in a second-grade classroom. Findings show how participants took up museum literacies differently, including their uses of printed texts and other communicative forms. Two short case studies are…

The possibilities of using Retrospective Miscue Analysis (RMA) with families to help parents and children investigate the reading process, are discussed with the goal of assisting parents to better understand their children's reading strengths. Highlighting a case study from a Family RMA project, this article illustrates how Family RMA provided a…

Informal classroom assessments remain essential tools for improving the instruction of students, even in an age of accountability testing. This article focuses specifically on Informal Reading Inventories (IRIs). Even though the growing number of commercially available IRIs has made choosing the ones most suitable for students' and teachers' needs…

A case study of one student is used to explore three instructional approaches that draw teachers' attention to reading as a social experience that involves culture and identity. These approaches draw on New Literacy Studies, children's media practices, and critical race theory and provide insights on how to better serve struggling readers.

The Picture It! reading strategy uses the elements of story grammar and visualization in a mnemonic format to enhance comprehension, aid vocabulary development, visually establish story sequence, and stimulate discussion of both the big picture of the story's meaning and the details which support the author's message. It is a strategy that can be…