Storytelling in the classroom has long been recognized for its many benefits, especially as a bridge from orality to literacy. With the changing demographic landscape present in current elementary classrooms across Canada and internationally, storytelling reaps additional benefits for promoting the goals of inclusion among diverse learner…

This article narrates the authors' experience with 5-year-old Aiden, one of the senior kindergarten children in the all-day, every-other-day classroom in which the authors studied the students' writing throughout the 2015-2016 school year, from September to June. Aiden was an interesting child because he always had a "plan" for whatever…

Using examples from family letters sent to the Department of Education's Elementary Correspondence School (ECS) in the western Canadian province of British Columbia in the early twentieth century, this article discusses three potential problems or traps associated with concepts of agency in the history of children and youth. Following a brief…

A speech-language pathologist and former primary teacher who is now a researcher conducting action research with kindergarten teachers in northern rural Canadian classrooms collaborate in an analysis of one teacher's interactions with her students in a dramatic play center. We use three principles to show how the teacher supports children's…

From a sociocultural approach to literacy, young children, including culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) children, can be viewed as active meaning-makers through participation in everyday literacy practices. This theoretical emphasis on the importance of the social context requires teachers and caregivers not only to improve and co-create…

Trickster tales, with their teachings on how to behave in the world, are a powerful means for transmitting social knowledge and cultural mores to children. In this study we compared two approaches to teaching fourth-grade students to write trickster tales. Although both instructional methods incorporated aspects of the writing process approach,…

A research project sought to raise reading achievement among senior Kindergarten students at Doncrest Public School (York, Ontario, Canada) to enable them to reach the Kindergarten reading standard and to maintain this level of reading over the summer months. In response to assessment data, the literacy program in Kindergarten was adapted to…

Children's drawings about reading and writing have unrealized potential for helping uncover the literacy narratives students bring to school and use to make sense of reading and writing. In this article, we highlight how one boy's drawing about literacy revealed his interpretation of his school's policy on violence as a topic of writing, which…

Reading youth writing is an avenue for the youth where they can express their opinions and ideas. In this article, the author questions whether practitioners in the field of cultural studies are actually engaged in this particular dialogue. The author has examined several articles written by young people from "Toronto Star." He realized…

A study investigated the impact of popular culture on young children's conception of gender, as revealed through the stories they write and tell. The research was conducted at Grosse Ile High School on the remote Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, Quebec, Canada, from 1991-1994 with 46 students ages 6-7 years old. The concept of the…

Describes how a Canadian teacher and her second and third graders developed a Web page using minimal technology. Discusses individual and collaborative writing projects, simple and cheap web file storage, HTML coding, hardware, hypertext links, multimedia projects, Internet connections, funding, student goals, motivation, audience response, and…