In today's diverse schools, meeting individual literacy needs of students is one of the most challenging aspects of teaching. Instructional scaffolding is a powerful tool that many literacy teachers use to meet the challenge. While the term denotes a wide array of strategies, most teachers use scaffolding in some form or another in their…

Discusses designing, initiating, and collecting observational data from a program designed for a multicultural inner-city kindergarten classroom to teach emergent literacy, to use picture books representing children's cultures, and to share responsibility for children's own learning by freely initiating interactions with print materials. Notes…