Drawing from a multiple-case study of professional learning in literacy, this article presents vignettes from a Grade 1 classroom where the professional learning focused on multimodal literacy pedagogies that combined digital and print-based resources to expand children's meaning-making. Linking children's opportunities for expansive literacy…

The perceptions of Tennessee educators who successfully implemented blended learning in their classrooms were the main focus of this phenomenological study. Blended learning is a modality that uses stations which consist of a teacher-led station, an online station, and an off-line station. Teachers work in small groups with students while others…

This article shares the authors' work with first graders and how, through various reading, writing, and art experiences around picturebooks, the children learned to read and communicate through art along with written language. The work is grounded in multimodality theory and the belief that all modes (particularly art for the purposes of this…

Young children frequently tell visual stories, drawing pictures to record and share their thoughts, feelings and understanding. How and what young children describe through art, especially when written language is not an option, is the focus of this interpretive analysis. A series of pictures by John, a 6-year-old boy, were drawn across the…

Due to variation that exists in providing Tier 2 reading intervention instruction, the purpose of the study was to identify processes and instructional strategies currently being utilized by K-2 teachers of the Gallup, New Mexico elementary schools. 17 teachers from 9 of the 10 elementary schools participated in the study. A survey instrument was…

Literate practice in the arts encompasses both aesthetics and creativity. It is also multimodal in nature and often collaborative. This article presents data collected from a small multi-age school, with children from Prep to Year 7, during their preparation for an end-of-year show. The children had studied the topics of conservation and…

Examined multiple modalities of nonspoken forms of representation-specifically gestures, pictures, objects, and writing-used by three teachers in three years of first grade math lessons. Students must attend to visual as well as vocal means of expressing information to gain access to all information presented in mathematics lessons. (BF)

A total of 138 middle-class first graders in two parochial schools were studied to determine whether a phonics reading approach was superior to a contextual reading approach in reading achievement, whether auditory learners achieve in reading to a greater extent than visual learners, and whether auditory or visual learners achieve in one program…

To explore methods of visual communication as a supplement to bilingual education, 200 white male subjects were selected from a public school system in South Florida (100 from the first grade and 100 from the eighth grade) and were allowed to create visual statements from a standardized set of photos. Using primarily Latent Partition Analysis, the…

This study compared 5 groups (45 each) of disadvantaged first grade children learning to read 16 basic sight vocabulary words. The subjects were enrolled in 1 of 16 classrooms on three campuses of a school district in Texas located on the southern border between the United States and Mexico. Furthermore, all spoke Spanish as their first language.…

Part of the new Knowledge Essentials series, "First Grade Success" shows parents how to enrich their children's classroom learning and take an active role in their first graders' education by exploring: (1) What their first graders are learning at school and the educational standards to expect in math, language arts, science, and social studies;…