Fans often express their love of authors or books by creating and sharing "fanfiction," a genre wherein fans write new narratives that add to beloved works or take place in existing story worlds. In this article, we describe a kindergarten teacher's efforts to enhance students' foundational literacy skills by combining author studies…

Many teachers make reading and writing poetry an important part of the school day. They use different instructional strategies that invite students to write poetry in meaningful, engaging, and creative ways. This article describes an instructional strategy that invites students to write etheree poetry across the curriculum. It discusses benefits…

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…

The story of Enlightenment literacy is often reconstructed from textbooks and manuals, with the implicit focus being what children were reading. But far less attention has been devoted to how they mastered the scribal techniques that allowed them to manage knowledge on paper. Focusing on Scotland, handwritten manuscripts are used to reveal that…

Notwithstanding the complex and dynamic nature of teaching and learning in schools, over four decades of research findings have consistently revealed a correlation between teacher expectations and student achievement. Focusing on teacher expectations for the narrative structures created by young children, this article features a discussion of data…

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…

Writing studies has been an intellectual playground dominated by the "big kids." If we are to understand how writing becomes "relevant" to children as children, then we must study them, not for who they are becoming, but for who they are in life spaces shared with other children. This essay on the methodology entailed in…

This paper documents an evaluation of children's written responses to a story telling package used in an intervention project set up by the National Association for the Teaching of English as part of the larger "Inspire Rotherham" literacy campaign. The brief was to provide a group of primary teachers with innovative and inspirational approaches…

This article positions a view of student responses with relation to current literacy expectations. Student responses to a single book, "The Egypt Game," are explored. The responses are analysed from a group and individual student perspectives. The responses demonstrate the complex understandings that young students created about this book.…

Reading and writing difficulties are markers for some forms of learning disorders, and measuring the distance between the child's performance and an expected level of attainment is a common approach to diagnosis. However, there are several problems with relying on the gap between achievement and expectation for arriving at a diagnosis, not least…

Case illustrations of a six-year-old boy's adventures with a missing tooth are used in this paper to re-define a broader notion of authorship. Drawing on theories of social semiotics, New Literacy Studies (NLS), and critical positioning, this notion of authorship not only interweaves the boy's preferred modes of meaning-making and communication,…

In this study, 114 preschoolers (M age = 53 months) completed a battery of literacy assessments to explore the interplay between name writing and letter knowledge in early literacy learners. Name writing was significantly related to children's letter knowledge, and the relationships were moderate to high. However, many children exhibited an…

This definitive book presents the newest research linking graphic narratives and literacy learning, as well as the tools teachers will need to make comic book projects a success in their classrooms. The Comic Book Project (www.comicbookproject.org) is an internationally celebrated initiative where children plan, write, design, and publish original…

Social networking can currently be described as a mainstream youth activity, with almost half of 8-17-year-old children, who have access to the Internet, claiming to participate. As an activity it is of particular interest to literacy educators because it is enacted through the production and consumption of text. However, a growing body of…

This research examined relationships between children's social awareness (ability to understand and negotiate intergroup relationships) and their narrative and persuasive writing. Forty 5th grade students wrote a short fictional narrative and a persuasive letter to their principal. Writing samples were coded for quality, form, and social…