Journey with a third-grade community of writers as they develop their writing identities and abilities in a responsive approach to writers' workshop. Instruction is framed around the writers' workshop approach, where students' choice and voice are centered within extended periods of time for writing, alongside daily mini-lessons addressing the…

A contributing factor to the loss of play in many early childhood classrooms is a sharp separation between literacy learning as serious, even urgent, academic work and play as optional, socially-beneficial-at-best, fun. To recenter play in the academic curriculum, early childhood educators must not only demonstrate how play benefits the existing…

Educators are increasingly aware of the role of classroom talk in cultivating students' language knowledge, which in turn supports their skilled reading comprehension. The result has been greater attention to teacher talk moves that transform class discussions into opportunities for language learning. However, less focus has been placed on the…

Student agency is an important dimension of classroom literacy learning. Recent calls have emphasized the need to support student agency in literacy. Despite this interest, the field lacks a viable instrument that can be used to measure student agency with elementary students. The authors share the Student Agency Profile, a survey instrument that…

We begin this article with a brief look at opportunities to learn for the nation's growing numbers of Emerging Bilingual children. We briefly present the research literature that supports the use of children's languages other in English (LOTEs) in literacy instruction whether the children are participating in bilingual/dual language programs or…

Poetry has often been described as the neglected genre despite its potential to engage and motivate students of all abilities in reading and writing. Indeed, poetry provides an excellent forum for the development of literacy skills and strategies in a meaningful context. The author describes how a teacher implemented a poetry genre study in a…

Because dual-language books (DLBs) print the entire text in two languages nearby on the page, they have great potential for supporting children's biliteracy development by providing contexts to compare/contrast languages. However, little is known about how children read DLBs independently and how they may/may not use such characteristics to…

During the 2020-2021 school year, the COVID-19 pandemic forced millions of students and teachers into hybrid or fully remote modalities. Compiling the experiences of teachers who taught foundational reading skills to their primary-age students in a hybrid model (a mix of both remote learners at home, joining via video conferencing, as well as…

The authors share findings from a study that incorporated two types of participatory interview approaches (conversational drawing interviews and walking tour interviews) to elicit young students' (K-2) motivation-related perceptions of a reading intervention to better understand and support their motivation for doing reading in the program. All 14…

In this article, I showcase an informational text reading comprehension unit that centers on text features commonly found in science textbooks. I taught this unit to a sixth-grade class and highlighted the work samples of three focal students here. The overarching question that guided this work was as follows: How can I focus my instruction on…

Expanding definitions of literacy requires classroom instruction that provides multiple pathways for students to demonstrate their understanding of the content and communicate knowledge. Privileging the use of visual and multimodal texts as valued school communication may create equitable practices for students who are new to English or struggle…

Fourth-grade students were introduced to a detailed process approach to examining mentor texts and then transferring their newfound knowledge of author craft to their own independent writing. The EASE strategy was created as a way to scaffold students from merely noticing the exceptional moves that authors make to adeptly applying these…

The author focuses on selecting texts for disciplinary literacy instruction in elementary grades. Disciplinary literacy instruction is a promising approach to engage students in socially and culturally relevant learning, and the selection of a variety of informational texts is important to planning this type of instruction. Currently, most…

There is little research on effective educational experiences for deaf and hard-of-hearing (d/hh) children in Jamaica. Using a formative and design experiment framework, in this project we explored the potential efficacy of an intensive literacy camp that provided professional development for d/hh adults working in classrooms with d/hh children,…

This study examined multilingual learners' achievement and growth in their language and literacy skills. Fifty-two multilingual students in Grades 2 and 4 with varying levels of English proficiency from Spanish-speaking homes in the American South participated in this study. They were assessed on English reading comprehension (RC), English word…