This ethnographic study documents how a space for critical literacy practices emerged as one teacher attempted to make literacy learning authentic. The school lunch program in an urban elementary district provided the theme for an authentic and focused literacy unit. Throughout this focus unit, the students not only met state standards but also…

The Family Backpack Project provided 249 low-income, prekindergarten children and their families with opportunities to read and listen to audio recordings of 3 sets of books in their homes. Families received English or dual-language texts (English plus Spanish, Arabic, Kurdish, or Somali) matched to their home languages. Children and their…

For four years, Pat Paugh, a university teacher educator, and Mary Moran, a teacher researcher, collaborated on action research by systematically studying literacy development connected to the latter's third-grade community gardening and urban farming curriculum. Their goal was to support an existing classroom culture that valued…

This article centers the stories of two eighth grade students in the context of a social action literacy project. Their teacher designed curriculum that scaffolded opportunities for them to address English language arts standards while speaking out for social change. The students' responses to the project reveal their civic literacy practices, as…

This photo essay includes children's reflections on the opportunities offered by Artists/Writers Workshop for meaning-making in two languages--the language of pictures and the language of words. As students move back and forth between pictures and words, they experience transmediation. They create new meanings, find new and stronger voices, and…

Provides job cards for language activities in the middle grade classroom which pick up on ideas from "The Phantom Tollbooth," a children's classic by Norton Juster. (DD)

Describes working with multiage elementary school students on demand writing--writing to meet deadlines. Discusses why to teach it, practical applications, what teachers need to know before beginning instruction, getting started, introducing demand writing, modeling it, teaching beginnings and endings, and revising and editing/proofreading. (SR)

Suggests that discussions on approaching poetry must begin with addressing the role of the classroom teachers and the attitudes about poetry that they bring to the classroom. Discusses a few general suggestions as to how poetry may be approached in the classroom. Discusses a poetry writing sequence which helps students explore images and…