School literacy in North America continues to focus on society's dominant languages. Literacy curriculum -- particularly during early grades -- has an urgency for children to quickly master emergent literacy skills in the official languages, vindicating the exclusion of literacy in other minoritized languages that multilingual children bring to…

As a growing base of evidence links student success with attendance, many states have chosen to include measures of student absenteeism in their accountability systems under ESSA. Consequently, school districts face strong incentives to improve attendance. We report on a randomized field experiment in which parents of early elementary students…

In this article, the authors share their experiences creating and implementing a unit focused on supporting bilingual identities through integrating language domains and translanguaging with authentic writing experiences. Two dual-language first-grade teachers from Colombia and the US worked together to model, celebrate, and support the use of…

Introducing patriotic holidays such as Veterans Day with historical photographs and other primary sources in classrooms can not only spark children's interest, but also promote critical thinking and historical comprehension. Meaningful, hands-on historical lessons can also motivate children to take informed action about issues they care about. We…

This study involved the development, implementation, and assessment of a comprehensive schoolwide mailing program as a practical tool to communicate enthusiasm towards writing to children and actively engage them in letter writing. The author played the dual role of teacher-researcher and worked for one school year with one teacher from each grade…

Teachers now have a wide range of tools to help assess the beginning reading performance of kindergarten and first-grade children. However, validated procedures for assessing the beginning writing skills of kindergarten and first-grade children are less widely available. Learning to write, like learning to read, is a complex task. The ability to…

"Integrating Writing, Academic Discourses, and Service Learning: Project Renaissance and School/College Literacy Collaborations" discusses a year-long general education program for first-year students that integrated disciplinary learning with a pen pal project in light of the goals of critical pedagogy and service-learning. The program aimed at…

One of the most difficult problems of modern school practice is how to prevent overcrowding the curriculum, breaking up the school day into small fragments of time devoted to disconnected tasks, and dissipating the energies of the children to such an extent that the process of education is hindered rather than helped by the attempts to enrich and…