Access to Friedrich Fröbel's essential writings continues to be a challenge for non-German-speaking scholarship. Many essential writings have never been translated, and existing translations are outdated. This article discusses the challenges of translating Fröbel by translating and analyzing one of the essential letters during the establishment…

Teaching is a stressful profession that requires individuals to balance their time, resources, and emotions. While many districts have plans in place to support the needs of their new teachers, few resources exist for those individuals who have given the most to the profession--veteran teachers. Attrition in education negatively impacts…

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…

Drawing from a network case study, this article traces enactments of a letter writing enquiry in one Kindergarten public school classroom in New York City, and in doing so, explores both the affordances and limitations of sociomaterial approaches employed by the researcher towards school literacies. Looking down at one morning meeting revealed…

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…

The role parents can play in supporting early reading attainment is well documented. There is still, however, a need to understand what motivates parents to become involved in reading at home with their child. Past research, based upon correlational studies, has mixed findings regarding the influence of the teacher and the child on parents'…

This article presents research that investigated how a school year-long letter-writing project between kindergarten students and extended family members could facilitate literacy development in students, as well as provide a way to build inter-generational bonds through correspondence focused on family history and stories. Analysis centered on the…

In a bid to identify and gain analytic insight into the make-up and dynamics of kindergarten literacy curricula in an era of early childhood education and care reform, this study was designed to trace how classroom literacy curricula were produced in a kindergarten in a childcare centre in Ontario, Canada. Drawing on actor-network theory's (ANT)…

The writing skills of 286 children (157 female and 129 male) were studied by comparing name writing and letter writing scores from preschool to kindergarten with letter and word reading scores over the same time period. Two rubrics for scoring writing were compared to determine if scores based on multiple components (i.e., letter formation,…

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…