To fully consider the potential of informational texts to serve as mentor texts in the elementary classroom, the authors propose an inquiry about the intersections among the author's intentions, instructional contexts, a teacher's approaches, and students' responses to informational texts when contemplating the roles these texts might serve. In…

The 2011 Children's Literature Assembly Workshop investigated cultural contexts and relevant issues in children's literature. Award-winning authors, illustrators, and an educator shared their thoughts about writing, illustrating, and teaching multiethnic literature. The panel included author Nikki Grimes, author and illustrator Eric Velasquez,…

O'Connor, an author of realistic fiction for children, shares her attempts to strike a balance between carefree, uncensored, authentic, realistic writing and age-appropriate writing. Of course, complicating that balancing act is the fact that what seems age-appropriate to her might not seem so to everyone. O'Connor suggests that while it may be…

This article comes from a speech that Richard Peck gave at the Colorado Language Arts Society Regional Spring Conference in 2007. At our request, he prepared this excerpt for "English Journal" readers.

In this article, the author of several PM Story Books (used in schools with 5-, 6-, and 7-year-olds who are learning to read) discusses components of those books which she believes makes them successful. It attributes the success of these books to the following 4 ingredients: (1) traditional story structure having the elements of a central…