In this research article, Haeny Yoon and Tran Nguyen Templeton explore the challenges of listening to children in both classrooms and research that purports to center young children. Through two stories from their respective studies, Yoon and Templeton highlight the complexities of following children's leads given the competing agendas situating…

Children tend to use certain drawing strategies differentially when asked to draw topics with positive and negative emotional characterisations. These effects have however only been established when children are asked to use standard drawing materials. The present study was designed to investigate whether the above pattern of children's response…

Early literacy instruction is receiving increasing emphasis. Many teachers of young children recognize that skills such as identifying and forming letters and practicing oral language skills are important (Helm & Katz, 2010). At the same time, teachers also report feeling pressure to focus on intensive drill and practice of isolated skills such as…

This article describes an integrated art and early literacy project entitled, Picture Partners". The main purpose of the project was to explore how young children create and express meaning through art. Children's responses, both written and spoken, were included because accompanying modes of expression expand the nature and content of their…

From a sociocultural approach to literacy, young children, including culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) children, can be viewed as active meaning-makers through participation in everyday literacy practices. This theoretical emphasis on the importance of the social context requires teachers and caregivers not only to improve and co-create…

In this article, the authors describe Picture Power, a project they implemented during late spring in a full-day Montessori preschool-kindergarten program in Philadelphia. In this project, the authors set out to gather information about children's visual learning. The underlying question was whether artwork could provide useful clues to inform…

This paper is concerned with the unfolding of human marks, beginning with scribbling, and their contribution to developing literacy. The paper argues that children's scribbles reveal a neural substrate destined for marks and influence that substrate significantly, cuing what is distinctly human in linguistic behavior and consciousness, or symbolic…

The nature of children's writing and drawing forms a useful starting point for examining journal writing with young children. Much research and literature suggests the educational value of having children write, yet a controversy exists among writing authorities concerning whether children's drawings are a necessary part of journal-writing…

Presents strategies for using children's drawing as scaffolding for early writing: (1) paving the way with drawing (talking about drawing, asking the right questions, social context); and (2) getting stories into writing (supporting children just learning what letters look like, with a good mental image of some letters, who can write most letters,…

Giving children opportunities to image and draw the words in the text and what they represent tends to unblock and extend children's potential abilities to assimilate and synthesize language. Evaluation of representational drawing need not be a barrier which discourages teachers from allowing children to draw. In effect, it might be judicious to…

Offers a case study of a first-grader who had trouble learning and for whom drawing was the symbol system used to organize and store her thoughts. Describes how her resource teacher capitalized on this and used drawing to move her from the visual to the spoken and then to the written word. (SR)

Explored images that young children construct of literacy in their lives, both inside and outside of school. Analysis of the drawings of 48 children in grades 1-3 revealed a shift in the children's images of themselves in relation to literacy with each grade level. The influence of home and family on literacy behaviors was also noted. (Author/TJQ)