Seven children ages five through nine engaged with two graduate student teachers after school in a university-based literacy lab. Based on a home interest survey, the essential question, "What is movement?" was explored. The children generated further questions, read a variety of texts, and wrote about their experiences. The teachers…

Despite strong support for integrating reading and writing instruction, writing practice is often crowded out of the schedule in elementary classrooms. To promote increased emphasis on writing, a working group of literacy researchers highlights three writing goals and six research-based reading-to-writing practices to enliven instruction with more…

Comics Academy is an after-school S.T.E.A.M. club in which students learn the history of comics, comic book formatting, the basics of drawing and perspective and, most important, how to collaborate to bring their stories to life through comics.

Interactive writing is a developmentally appropriate activity used to enhance children's literacy development in the preschool setting. This article describes the unique needs of preschoolers as emerging writers, including their developing fine motor skills, early literacy skills, and social skills related to group writing. Strategies are provided…

See, Say, Write is an adaptable classroom writing routine that teachers can use across a range of activities in the preschool classroom. This preschool writing routine offers an opportunity for teachers to build on a shared experience through engagement in rich conversation and writing. After a shared experience, teachers will provide a visual…

The IMSCI model for teaching writing scaffolds the instruction so that students understand the features of a genre, see the teacher model writing a text in the target genre, participate in the creation of a text in the genre (through shared or collaborative writing), and independently write a text in the genre. This model is based on social…

Expressions of delight and anticipation are a direct result of a schoolwide writing program designed by teachers to develop language skills in special education students. These second graders participated in a writing project that made use of wikis to facilitate collaboration among the students, parents, teachers, and university members of their…

Reading and writing are being transformed by global changes in communication practices using new media technologies. This article introduces iPed, a research-based pedagogy that enables teachers to navigate innovative digital text production in the literacy classroom. The pedagogy was generated in the context of a longitudinal digital literacy…

Popular technologies offer new and exciting ways to capitalize on the strengths of authentic writing, the power of the writing process, and the engagement of collaborative writing. Blogs are one of those technologies. Blogs are websites that allow individuals to create personal webpages of text, pictures, graphics, videos, and other multimedia…

Illustrates, through a description and examples, the collaboration between a university class and an elementary class. Describes pen pals and collaborative book writing as two approaches that provide student writers with the opportunity to receive rehearsal of strategies such as invented spelling, writing as a process, and integrating the language…

Describes "cooperative poetry," a group poetry-writing exercise combining brainstorming, rehearsing, choral reading, assisted reading, memorization, sequencing, and vocabulary development, as well as providing an opportunity for group cooperation. (MM)

Describes a poetry-writing formula that guarantees successful results for writing poems at the elementary level. (MM)

Describes how children in a second-grade classroom collaborate to write classbooks for every conceivable reason. Notes that these books are a very popular take-home item. (SR)

Presents a story-writing activity to encourage the relationship between children's experiences with literature and their ability to write. Emphasizes the importance of having students work in cooperative groups. (MG)

Discusses the Young Authors Program, a program sponsored by the Greater Boston Reading Council, which encourages teachers to help students create original illustrated bound books. (MM)