This document consists of the first four issues (Volume 1) of "Literacy Works," a newsletter of the Saskatchewan Literacy Network. The premier issue reports on the board, staff, and historical perspective of the network, and also contains a brief article on education for the workplace, a review of "Writing to Read" by Martin…

This illustrated booklet contains short statements written by students of adult basic education and other adult literacy programs offered in connection with Randolph Community College in North Carolina. The writings are in the students' words in language that is meaningful and pertinent to their levels of reading. The writings are grouped into the…

A hands-on strategy for children to use in determining how sentences and paragraphs work is based on the easily understood notion of topic placement in sentences, with reference to the less easily definable terms of coherence and cohesion. Children can learn that the topic is expected at the beginning of the sentence (followed by a comment) and…

Developed at Roosevelt Elementary School in Long Beach Unified School District (California), this CD-ROM presents Children Teaching Children (CTC), a literacy project intended to assist students to read, write, and publish their original work. It is part of the Program Improvement Initiative, an educational reform effort initiated by the…

This study reports on ways student under-achievement is being dealt with in the Bilingual Program of Jackson, New Jersey in grades 1-5. The study is limited to students in one school and was carried out during one 12-month period. It focuses on the following issues: (1) teaching methods which are best suited to solve the problems of student…

Guided story invention is a strategy for whole language instruction. The strategy stimulates construction of story and storylike passages, and incorporates: (1) student knowledge of story structure; (2) the reading and writing of meaningful text; (3) a focus on meaning as a function of teacher coaching; and (4) encouragement of self-monitoring of…

Children Teaching Children (CTC): Collection II is a CD-ROM created at 6 elementary schools in the West Contra Costa Unified School District (California) as part of the Coaching Odyssey for school improvement. CTC II, published by the California Department of Education, is an effective early literacy intervention that integrates the development of…

Reflects on how the author's third-grade students, experienced in literary conversation from their reading workshop, transferred the practice of literary conversation to their writing workshop. (SR)

Describes a nonfiction genre study in a first-grade class in which reading and writing minilessons focused on nonfiction, and the children were required to read nonfiction and write a piece in that genre. Notes that, by the end of the nonfiction study, the group exhibited confidence and comfort with nonfiction. (SR)

Discusses how pretending to be a character or to help a character with a problem made reading and writing meaningful for middle school students. Describes activities that promoted writing about thinking, thinking as a character would, character integration, creating character journals, and relating to characters. (SR)

Based on emergent literacy research, two components of reading and writing--the morning message and the writing process--were developed in a laboratory school kindergarten by teacher-researcher collaboration and later disseminated to both public and private schools through a project conducted for the Kamehameha Schools, a private school in…

Describes how a shared poetry exercise, combining whole language experiences with process writing techniques, motivates remedial readers. Notes that this technique helps remedial readers achieve success in writing, build sight and meaning vocabularies, and improve reading fluency. (MM)

Previous studies on emergent literacy have shown that since young children learn a lot about writing and reading before they attend school, teachers can build on this knowledge in an integrated instructional program. But just how reading and writing are intertwined in the learning process has not been clearly defined. This study investigated the…

A study examined the processes and results of children's involvement in interrelated reading/writing activities. First, descriptions of 23 children's reading and writing behavior were drawn from a group of case studies of children who were participating in Reading Recovery, an early intervention program that targets first grade children at risk of…

Organized to help make use of dialogue journals, this pamphlet presents a description of how this instructional aid can be used in a number of different classroom settings and for a variety of purposes. The booklet provides many samples of dialogue writing that enable the reader to see how this form of natural writing can become an effective…