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

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

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

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.

Explores (from the point of view of the writer, a children's author) one aspect of learning about language that is present in the picture books he writes: the relation between sound and sense.

In this issue you will read about elementary children who are introduced to genre primarily through their teachers reading aloud. The children are invited to become inquirers who continue to explore books as they meet in small groups to write and read on their own—from fantasy to African folktales to poetry.

This article discusses the efforts of a fifth-grade teacher and a visiting poet to rekindle students' sense of poetic passion and pleasure and describes how the authors introduced students to poems for two voices.

This study examines the writing practices taken on and negotiated by multilingual class members within two multiage elementary classrooms.

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.