Using data from a year-long case study in a Midwestern public school in the United States, the author invites readers into the play world of four multilingual and multiracial boys, affectionately named the "LEGO Boys" by their third-grade teacher. As documented in the findings, the boys maintained a cohesive narrative about how their…

Children in a grade two/three classroom co-designed photographs of each other's important family objects to develop critical empathy and better understand their peers' home cultures. They engaged in visual critical literacy practices. The paper provides a narrative of what happened and a framework for creative collaborative pedagogy.

In this article, the authors present a literacy research project in which humor, popular culture, and improvisational comedy (improv) are viewed as curricular resources to engage students' minds "and" bodies in multimodal story building, following a posthuman assemblage theory approach to literacy learning. This approach takes students'…

With the goal of supporting students' writing and content area learning using play as a pedagogical model, teachers' action research projects involved kindergarten and grade 1 students collaborating to create texts for a range of purposes. The authors analyzed the project activities for their starting points or motivators, student and teacher…

This article discusses how to implement paired reading with developing readers to foster students' fluency and reading comprehension. The teacher first helps students comprehend the story with focused discussion questions and the completion of a beginning, middle, and end (B-M-E) chart. Then, the teacher scaffolds students to do the oral reading…

Technology-enhanced classrooms offer dynamic possibilities for teachers and students. The teacher's role can shift from being an expert in control of the class to being a coach who challenges students to use technology to explore the world and share their findings in innovative ways. Such redefining of roles, however, involves risk and often…

This Teaching Tips describes a yearlong process of facilitating meaningful discussion groups about literature with first-grade students in an urban Title I school. At the beginning of the year, the teacher provided explicit instruction in speaking and listening skills to support students with the social skills needed for thoughtful discussion. She…

In the classroom experiences described in this article, grade three students were introduced to storytelling through the interactive read aloud of a mentor text and a storytelling demonstration, followed by daily collaborative activities involving listening, speaking, reading, and writing, culminating in dramatic storytelling performances. The…

In this article the authors integrate literacy with classroom-based technologies to create a student produced movie. The authors explain the steps to classroom movie production that deepens students' comprehension, engages students' in purposeful writing, and utilizes new technologies. (Contains 6 figures.)

Too often, instruction designed to improve literacy achievement for black male readers and writers focuses on skill-based learning, ignoring cultural, social, and personal development. This article calls for the use of critical literacy strategies with African American male students, which can raise expectations for academic achievement by…

This article describes how fifth-grade students created collaborative online learning communities while discussing and responding to literature on an asynchronous message board. At their own initiative, students constructed and posted various types of literature response prompts, which elicited rich responses from their peers. Types of identified…

A six-week long intervention that introduced second graders to poetry writing is described in this article, ending in a classroom "poetry cafe" culminating event. This article details the established classroom "writing workshop" structure and environment and the perceptions and observations of how students responded to the instruction. Four poetry…

Discusses the major benefits that emerge for students and teachers when groups of six students discuss a book they are reading without teacher questions to structure and guide their interactions. Shows that books mixing narrative and exposition have the greatest potential to enhance student discussion. (SR)