This article provides practical ideas for integrating technologies into the classroom in ways that honor students' out-of-school technology funds of knowledge.

A literacy support teacher leads a district-wide initiative to organize content-area teachers in an effort to help their students become better readers by offering instruction and practice in five reading strategies across the curriculum.

The authors describe their struggles and eventual success with students in constructing a "counternarrative to colormuteness and colorblindness"—the self-imposed student segregation and silencing of voice.

By designing lessons to activate prior knowledge and linking these activities to reading and writing, teachers found that students were more engaged, that they learned more material more quickly, and that they more willingly incorporated reading into their lives.

This article reports on the meaning potential of daily access to drawing/writing media for widening and deepening meaning construction.

This article discusses the imaginative activities and assignments that teachers often assign that violate the text around which the lesson is focused and that mislead students about its meaning.

An annotated bibliography of books that exemplify the plot elements, character, setting, and theme. Includes guidelines on how to do a book talk.

Colleen A. Ruggieri offers a multigenre, mulltiple intelligences unit on transcendentalism complete with suggested texts and an assessment plan.

Research comes alive when students explore a range of alternate genres instead of writing the traditional research report.

Describes a research paper in the author's high school English classroom which connected to the lives and interests of students, who delved into community problems with as much rigor (and using many types of research as traditional essays exploring arcane philosophical questions). Describes creating a context for exploration, and students' final projects.

This science inquiry in a fourth-grade classroom affirms the importance of observation, questioning, reading, and writing to the inquiry process.

Kenneth Lindblom and Patricia A. Dunn teach language awareness and use through published complaints about the teaching of grammar. Students are able to recognize issues of race and class that determine acceptable usage and learn the importance of audience in their own language use.

Suggests the authentic audience found on the Internet has a profound effect on the quality of student writing in all grades, and that the key to successful technology projects is integrating them into the curriculum so that computers are a means, not an end. Offers ideas for classroom activities and projects using stand-alone computers, and using computers with Internet access.

Argues that regular homophone practice enhances vocabulary knowledge, spelling skills, pronunciation ability, and overall reading proficiency. Describes how card games played with decks of homophones helped to accomplish these things. Notes particular benefits of homophone games to ESL students, and outlines key advantages of using the games.

Veteran educator Howard Miller shares a set of strategies that can propel middle school writers (and "inventive" spellers) into the role of being responsible and strategic in this Voices from the Middle article.

Describes how an English teacher uses ghost stories in his classroom to further students' interest in and understanding of epics. Presents a short unit in which all the class work focuses on scary kinds of things.

This article shows how to affirm and draw on the dialect diversity of students to foster the learning of Standard English.

Through looking critically at the underpinnings of "story mapping, a teacher uncovers a contradiction between the author's definition of reading as a constructive process and the reductionist nature of story mapping, which she shows inhibits students' potential to explore a diverse range of personal responses by promoting comprehension over response, uniformity over diversity, and control over freedom.

Reading internalizes every aspect of good writing—if you're reading good writing, which most middle school textbooks aren't. Here are criteria and suggestions for good content-area articles and trade nonfiction books.

This article describes different ways that students can report on books they have read other than the traditional "book report."