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.

The book offers a practical approach to Hurston using a range of student-centered activities for teaching Hurston's nonfiction, short stories, and the print and film versions of Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Provides high school teachers with teaching strategies, classroom activities, and student samples for teaching the works of Sherman Alexie.

Carmaletta M. Williams provides high school teachers with background on Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance as well as help in teaching Hughes's poetry, short stories, novels, and autobiography.

Carol Jago offers ways to teach the works of Judith Ortiz Cofer in the high school English classroom.

Offers high school teachers an activity-based approach to teaching the works of Amy Tan, especially The Joy Luck Club and The Opposite of Fate.

Carol Jago offers readers a handy guide for bringing this celebrated author's work into the classroom, including biographical information, ideas for literature circles using Walker's short stories, sample writing lessons using Walker's poems, suggestions for teaching The Color Purple, and a wealth of resources for further investigation of Alice Walker and her work.

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."

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.

Offers 50 diverse suggestions intended to offer students new ways to think about a piece of literature, new directions to explore, and ways to respond with greater depth to the books they read.

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 resolution explains what educators can do to work with young people composing nonprint media that can include any combination of visual art, motion (video and film), graphics, text, and sound -- all of which are frequently written and read in nonlinear fashion.