Although kindergarteners often are excited to share their mathematical ideas, they may not be sure how to explain the underlying reasoning that brought them to their answers. Teachers seeking to use literacy skills in mathematics to support kindergarteners' reasoning can use writing to provide each student an avenue to communicate their individual…

Drama has the potential to enrich and enliven established approaches to literacy learning, engaging students and expanding their possibilities for meaning-making. Drama-rich pedagogy is well-established as an effective tool in supporting language and literacy development. However, research to date has not explored the possibilities of using drama…

Disciplinary literacy approaches recently have been finding their way into early elementary classrooms (K-2) and preschool, but this idea still needs more careful study, discussion, and operationalizing before determining its value and place in the early grades curriculum. The purpose of this article is to describe a case of curriculum exploration…

The purpose of the study was to examine how integrated science and disciplinary literacy instruction influenced the quality of science informational text produced by first-grade students and student perceptions these young children held about scientists. The disciplinary literacy instruction took place over the course of 8 weeks (three 20-30-min…

The purpose of this article is to share how one teacher implemented exploratory writing within a mathematics lesson to support her third graders in making sense of fractions and communicating their mathematical ideas. The author defines exploratory writing, then describes the teacher's lesson while also presenting a general overview about how to…

This dissertation study explores the emergence of off-task engagement, in which three Chinese first-graders write mathematically. It seeks the solution to the conflict between the intended mathematics writing and the realized mathematics writing, which ties to the Cartesian rationality dominating mathematics classrooms--that tends to ignore…

Integrating content-area and literacy instruction in primary-grade classrooms creates authentic and engaging opportunities for students to build background knowledge and literacy skills. Furthermore, when students engage in meaningful dialogue about content-area topics they can discuss complex ideas and use content-specific vocabulary. These…

Curriculum guidelines and professional organizations' recommendations lack details about how often and how much students should write in mathematics and what characteristics should define their writing. This study presents an analytic framework that addresses how often students are prompted in student mathematics books to write, how much they may…

Common Core State Standards emphasize the importance of informational writing in primary grades. In such writing, importance is placed on the writing being scholarly and scientific. However, such writing can be rote and dry, with little voice. The purpose of this article was to propose a working definition of voice in science writing for first…

In a randomized trial that collects text as an outcome, traditional approaches for assessing treatment impact require that each document first be manually coded for constructs of interest by human raters. An impact analysis can then be conducted to compare treatment and control groups, using the hand-coded scores as a measured outcome. This…

In today's multimodal landscape, coding has a space in the elementary literacy curriculum. Coding and literacy have many parallels, which are described in further detail. The author also explains why coding should be integrated into the primary grades and the steps that teachers can take to implement coding in the literacy curriculum. The free app…

This study examined the effectiveness of Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) to improve students' ability to write expository essays after reading social studies text. Third-grade general education teachers (N = 14) were randomly assigned by clusters to SRSD or a business as usual control condition. One hundred and eighty consented students…

Recent educational policy documents have encouraged engaging students in mathematical argumentation via discussion and writing. Most recently in the U.S., the Common Core State Standards recommend that children "construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others." One often advocated means of engaging students in this…

Current mathematics curricula and assessments emphasize students' ability to communicate mathematical reasoning in writing. Limited research exists, however, on what mathematics writing (MW) is and how to assess the quality of MW. Therefore, based on our definition of MW construct, we explored 4 approaches to scoring MW: (a) holistic rubric…

In this eagerly anticipated revision of their bestselling book, authors Diane Staehr Fenner, Sydney Snyder, and Meghan Gregoire-Smith share dynamic, research-backed strategies that every educator of multilingual learners (MLs) can add to their repertoire. Including more of what educators loved from the first edition--authentic classroom examples,…