Tom Romano leads students to allow themselves creative freedom while developing the patience to hone that first rush into a tight and effective piece of writing with voice.

This position on Multimodal Literacies is a summary statement developed by the Multimodal Literacies Issue Management Team of the NCTE Executive Committee.

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.

This article helps eighth graders review the power of adjectives. Students eat up this project that promises to deliver the opportunity to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate while giving students the chance to work in cooperative groups. All in all, it's an appetizing way to get kids focused on descriptive writing.

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.

Grammar should be taught in the context of students' own writing: "we learn what we actually have the opportunity to practice and do in the real world."

Argues that, taught in the context of writing, grammar can enhance and improve students' writing. Offers classroom examples showing how: good preparation for writing fosters good grammar and detail; students can use grammatical and syntactic constructions used by professional authors as models for their own writing; and how to help students learn revision strategies at the sentence and paragraph level.

Dunning and Stafford, both widely known poets and educators, offer this delightful manual of exercises for beginning poets.

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.