Presents an approach used in high school English classes to connect students with the world outside high school. Encourages students to take risks by selecting a project topic, choosing and inviting a guest speaker, preparing for the visit, reading and writing on related topics, and doing a follow-up project. (SR)

Describes the collaboration between two teachers, involving six eighth grade and two ninth grade English classes, to present a unit reflecting the needs, hopes, and potential of the handicapped. Explains how volunteerism was incorporated into the classroom. Describes preparation, traveling to the Special Olympics State Basketball Tournament, class…

This "funbook" presents reading and writing activities to help children prepare for reading and writing. Activities introduce the alphabet, and assist children to print letters of the alphabet and engage in other readiness tasks. The margins of many of the pages present instructions for "reading partners." The booklet includes…

Content area teachers interested in using writing to learn activities need to be well informed about the learning promoted by certain writing tasks before assigning them. Writing assignments should not be thoughtlessly and arbitrarily assigned with the expectation that learning, somewhat miraculously or mysteriously, will occur. Although writing…

Shares an account of efforts by a teacher to try and involve 7- to 11-year-old children in a book investigation which would provide them with investigative strategies applicable to subsequent works. (MG)

Developed by national reading experts for "reading partners" to use with children, ages birth to grade 6, this Spanish-language booklet presents activities that help very young children to get ready for reading and writing, and guide older children to expand their reading and writing interests and skills. The booklet has three sections,…

Parents can help their children master the skills needed to become good writers. While preschool pupils, in most cases, cannot do their own writing, the parents can: ask their children for ideas to include in letters to friends or relatives; write down, and then read back, ideas dictated by the child; read interesting library books to their…

A simple, but useful, handout given to mothers of young children can greatly increase the likelihood that they will present aspects of emergent literacy in their homes. The concept of emergent literacy states that all literacy learning begins in infancy and proceeds forward from that point, and that all of the literacy skills of oral language,…