Describes how Michigan's English Language Arts Assessment (ELA) takes parts of the old fifth-grade writing assessment and fourth-grade reading tests, adds new elements, and wraps everything around a theme. Presents a seven-step activity to help prepare fourth graders for the ELA. Concludes that the overall impact on scores is not known. (SG)

Describes how one fourth-grade teacher used television, videos, computers, classroom guests, and lots of reading and writing to engage his students in their language-arts unit, focusing on the book "Shiloh." Discusses how such "intermediality" (using multiple media) increases students' comprehension and understanding of text, capturing their…

Developed for grades kindergarten through four, this book contains activities for using the newspaper as an educational resource for content area instruction. The first two sections of the book offer a pretest for determining how much students use newspapers and what they know about newspapers, and introductory information on newspaper components…