Because schools place such high importance on text-based analysis often devoid of opportunities to draw on home knowledge, diverse ways of making meaning from books are often ignored. This qualitative study of a bilingual second-grade classroom examined the manner in which four young Latina students told stories about their life experiences in…

This article describes a day in the life of a second grade girl in Beijing, China. There are more than 1.3 billion people in China today. This story does not represent the experience of all Chinese children any more than one of your student's journal entries would represent the experience of all American children. Still, the story, which describes…