In this study, we focused on the implementation of a disciplinary literacy inquiry unit with a group of sixth-grade students. Guided by us, students learned about a local budgetary crisis, researched subtopics of interest to them (e.g., the effect of budget cuts on school athletics), and then wrote letters to their state's governor sharing their…

In this article, the authors introduce ways to use disciplinary literacy (DL) instructional strategies to foster civic engagement and reasoning for middle-grade multilingual students. Four phases of DL strategies--"framing," "reading," "discussion," and "writing"--are illustrated with examples from an…

The purpose of this article was to offer guidance to educators in evaluating the strengths, weaknesses, and most effective uses of commercial reading assessment suites. We provide three resources to help educators who are responsible for making instructional decisions in reading using formal screening, benchmark, interim, and progress-monitoring…

The authors share an activity in which two fifth-grade teachers and one sixth-grade teacher received book talk videos via Flipgrid from preservice literacy teachers and watched the videos with their students. Students responded with feedback and suggestions for how to better represent each book. The authors compiled and coded students' comments…

We paint a picture of preadolescent students' thinking on a topic of everyday importance: the right to use and the responsibility not to abuse digital technology in school. We analyzed the writing of students in grades 4-7 in response to an essay prompt about classroom iPad (tablet computer) use after a hypothetical cyberbullying incident,…

The author explores the possibilities that posthumanist thinking offers for amplifying our understanding of multimodality in children's literacies in school and beyond. Drawing on data from a five-month case study on the multimodal literacy practices of six fifth-grade students across home, community, and school settings, the author focuses on one…

The growing popularity of graphic novels for younger readers is hard to miss. This article provides specific ways to think about, recognize, and teach with multimodal texts that leverage student interest. In this English language arts unit, we taught a sixth-grade class how to read and comprehend the complex design elements common to the graphic…

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…

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…

Evidence-based writing is a complex standard in the Common Core State Standards that has taken center stage in the writing curriculum. Students must demonstrate proficiency in making claims based on evidence and explain how the evidence supports their claim. This is a challenging task for all students, but for English learners, it can be…

Sourcing involves interrogating historical documents, asking questions about their attributes to determine their relation to the historical event or time period under study. In this article, a university researcher and a sixth-grade teacher describe a set of heuristics that the teacher developed for supporting her students' sourcing of historical…

This article offers insight into what makes literacy tasks engaging or disengaging based on observations of and interviews with students. In a yearlong study of a sixth-grade classroom in a Title I school, students engaged in integrated literacy-social studies instruction. Researchers studied the degree of task openness and the degree to which…

Many sixth grade students think they are telling the truth when they complain, "Reading is boring." However, they don't realize what sort of activities encompass reading. As a teacher with a few years of experience, I am finding new ways to engage reluctant readers and show them reading can take many different forms. In this essay, I…

This article describes how one teacher implemented a memoir genre study in her sixth grade classroom using a writing workshop approach. It begins by outlining the author's philosophy and rationale for teaching writing in this manner. This is followed by a discussion of how one could organize one's classroom for a memoir genre study. Several…

How can we supplement the limited time available for vocabulary instruction while motivating students to attend to the words they are learning? As a part of an academic word vocabulary intervention, we challenged sixth-grade students to find their words in the world around them. This activity, In the Media, garnered responses from 51 of the 61…