Presents an excerpt from Katherine Neville's best-selling novel "The Eight," and discusses how the excerpt could be used in a mathematics class. Includes possible class activities and reading and writing assignments. (SR)

Describes a free writing exercise designed to help first-year college students confront perceptions they have of themselves as learners. (RS)

Discusses providing developmental learners with the opportunity to hear and respond to vignettes (short, descriptive literary sketches such as those in "The House on Mango Street"). Notes that the activity allowed students to experiment with another writing style and to use figurative language in a creative way. (RS)

Describes a strategy called RAFT (Role, Audience, Format, Topic) used to promote comprehension in content area classrooms. (SR)

Presents a point, counterpoint strategy which helps students build a repertoire of interpretive strategies that can be enlisted when dealing with complex short stories. Notes that the key to the strategy is that students begin with their personal responses and move toward more public and generalized interpretations. (RS)

Argues that summarizing, paraphrasing, and precis writing skills are important to the development of critical thinking and the ability to learn from text. Describes the use of precis writing in the English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) classroom. (RS)

Offers an eight-stage activity which promotes critical thinking. Notes that the activity starts with analysis of literary characters and culminates with presentations based on interviews of respected adults. (PRA)

Describes the use of character journals (a written diary kept by the reader who assumes the role of the main character) with a group of eighth-grade students. Shows how students think more about what they are reading and come away with a better sense of their own identity. (SR)

Describes an activity/assignment involving composition and cooperative learning which is designed to help students learn to attend to context clues. (SR)

Describes the use of alternative types of poetry and affirmations to encourage self-esteem and break down barriers to learning in an adult basic skills reading class. (SR)

Uses junk mail, newspaper advertisements, and other promotional material to overcome one teacher's lack of instructional material and to teach multilingual and multicultural teenagers and adults the basics of consumer advocacy and American civics. Notes that the students gained power through literacy that would not have been possible with…

Presents a visual literacy approach for limited-English-speaking students that incorporates both language and nonverbal thought processes. Describes how students take photographic essays, reconstruct the developed pictures using the visual framework of semantic maps, and write essays based on the photographs. (RS)

Offers eight teaching suggestions from teachers, regarding an effective strategy for teaching inferential comprehension, how to chose a good book, book celebrations, annotation writing for developmental readers, an assignment to promote reading for pleasure, a discussion group program for adult new readers, memo writing as an information network,…