Argues that elementary language-arts teachers should expand their definition of "text" to include film, a valuable instructional material. Notes that today's elementary students come to class with a great deal of knowledge about films--prior experiences which teachers can tap into. Discusses the application to film of reader-response theories.

Examines young children's ability to vary the forms of emergent writing as they wrote a story, a shopping list, and a letter to a friend at three different times during the school year. Finds that children apply their emergent knowledge about written language differently. Indicates a considerable mismatch between written products and knowledge of genre characteristics.

Nonfiction is the genre most likely to spur children's passion and wonder for learning. This article discusses way to motivate children to read nonfiction.

Offers a conceptual framework for building language awareness through the reading of poetry, encouraging children to reflect on language in interesting and powerful ways. Provides an instructional model for constructing literature-based experiences in the classroom.

Standards for the English Language Arts presents a vision of literacy education that encompasses the use of print, oral, and visual language and addresses six interrelated English language arts: reading, writing, speaking, listening, viewing, and visually representing.

Wheeler and Swords show K–6 teachers how to use code-switching and contrastive analysis to help students use prior knowledge to translate vernacular English into Standard English.

NCTE's Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar provides this much-needed resource for teachers who wonder what to do about grammar—how to teach it, how to apply it, how to learn what they themselves were never taught.

Katie Wood Ray explains in practical terms the theoretical underpinnings of how elementary and middle school students learn to write from their reading.

A practical, comprehensive, and illuminating guide for both new and experienced teachers that confronts the challenges of the writing workshop head-on.

This lesson introduces the concept of cause and effect with Trinka Hakes Noble's books about Jimmy and his boa constrictor.

Using books by Ezra Jack Keats as inspiration, students explore problems and solutions through read-alouds, discussion, and an interactive bulletin board.

Students write theme poems in a flash using the picture book Flicker Flash by Joan Bransfield Graham and the online, interactive Theme Poems tool.

Students will go batty about the three writing strategies they learn in this lesson centered on Nicola Davies' Bat Loves the Night.

"Bessie bird lives in a barn" in this lesson in which students create alliterative animal songs to help them learn letter names and consonant sounds and build phonemic awareness.

A big green monster helps students build their reading fluency and word recognition skills through choral reading, literacy center activities, and writing stories.

Through interactive writing, students work together and then independently to create invitation letters for a group of their peers and their families.

In this lesson, students use both fiction and nonfiction texts, the Internet, and a K-W-L chart to learn about how animals survive the winter.

"2-4-6-8, students will be spelling great" in this lesson that teaches the y rule for adding suffixes through cheering the spelling of words aloud, word sorts, and writing stories.