This teaching tip details one teacher's implementation of student-led book talks in her primary-grade classroom. The author describes a simple gradual-release method that she has successfully used with her students in order to get them talking about the books that they are reading independently. She found that when used in the readers' workshop…

Based on research conducted in a fourth-grade classroom, the author describes one teacher's process for integrating social studies and English language arts using a writers' workshop approach. Furthermore, the fourth-grade teacher was able to provide students with an opportunity to engage in multimodal composition. After conducting research…

This article offers insights into students' perceptions of writing through the use of drawings and written responses. In a descriptive qualitative study of fifth graders across two diverse elementary schools, students were prompted to draw a picture about a recent experience with writing and how that experience made them feel. Students were then…

Reading and creating stories is a longstanding pedagogical approach to literacy learning in elementary school classrooms because stories offer personal and human experiences to which students can relate and respond. Stories, including digital forms such as short films, offer accounts of what it is to belong to a community and its worldviews and…

Literature circles, or book clubs, are a long-standing pedagogical tradition designed to support students' reading and response to literature. However, critics of these student-led literature discussions have argued that this format can limit opportunities for students to engage meaningfully with political, social, and cultural issues. The purpose…

This article was inspired by the fact that teachers have been asked to increase the difficulty of texts that students encounter without clear guidance on how to support their students when reading difficult texts. First, findings are presented from a recent review that investigated the effects of increased text difficulty on elementary students'…

Response to Intervention (RTI) is a multiple tiered system of instructional interventions that may also serve to identify children with Specific Learning Disabilities (particularly in reading and spelling). This article summarizes the findings of Evaluation of Response to Intervention Practices for Elementary School Reading (Balu, Zhu, Doolittle,…

Despite a wealth of scholarship documenting its linguistic complexity, students in the United States are rarely encouraged to speak or write in African American Language (AAL) in their primary classrooms. The authors documented how one teacher and his highly diverse second-grade class examined, explored, and experimented with AAL in an…

The author introduces the literature selection bookmark, a tool that inservice and preservice teachers who are teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) in international contexts can use to guide them in selecting authentic children's English literature and analyze its utility in the elementary English-language classroom. Authentic children's…

Walk a Day in My Shoes is a curricular project designed to provide a starting point for teachers to cultivate cross-cultural understanding among elementary-age students. In this curricular project, students created their own digital stories about a day spent in their shoes. Through photography, writing, and digital storytelling, each student…

In this article, the authors report findings from a yearlong study that addressed teaching first-grade students to make inferences and engage in inferential discussion about children's literature. Because of the importance of both inferencing and discussion for comprehension, a collaborative team of two researchers and a classroom teacher focused…

The author presents findings from a yearlong study of the ways an inclusive fourth-grade teacher and her students talked about reading outside of formal reading lessons. Findings indicated that across the school day, especially during informal moments, students narrated connections and disconnections between their experiences and realistic fiction…

An essential element in teaching children to effectively comprehend text is the use of teacher-led think alouds. This article presents a three-step model to improve the quality and quantity of think alouds in K-6 classrooms. The article follows elementary teachers who planned, implemented, transcribed, and reflected upon think aloud lessons to…

The term "close reading" often conjures up an image of a teacher asking students several scripted questions that encourage them to reread and critically examine a text. The teacher then evaluates the students' responses. In this article, the authors offer another approach to close reading--one that places students' text-dependent…

The authors examined the results of a three-year summer intervention, Dig Into Reading, for pre-first-grade through pre-third-grade students. This partnership among university professors, public school Title I teachers, and primary classroom teachers resulted in the development of research-based, copyright-free, replicable summer reading…