Children's songs inspire the love of music in children and improve their musical skills and at the same time, teach national values and societal rules, contribute to their personality development, make children feel happier, foster interpersonal communication and particularly contribute to the cognitive and linguistic development of children at…

Planning plays an important role in the production of written texts. Little is known about why children plan and the plans they create when they are not explicitly instructed. This study explores the plans that elementary school children in Years 1, 3, and 5 create before writing a text. We compared performance of children educated in Catalan and…

Spurred by burgeoning racist and xenophobic immigration policy and rhetoric, we analyzed the writing of seven second-grade children about their experiences of living connections that span the United States-Mexico border. Informed by research on children's "testimonios" in literacy classrooms and Anzaldúa's concept of the border/lands, we…

The purpose of this study was to examine construct validity of methods of calculating lexical diversity in written narrative samples relative to children's performance on a reading vocabulary measure. For 234 children in first to fifth grade, written narratives were examined and compared between grades for number of different words (NDW), total…

In Prince George's County Public Schools in Maryland, the Our Lives, Our Words program puts digital cameras in the hands of elementary-aged English language learners. Teachers plan lessons that allow students to use photography as way to support and extend their writing.

A process writing project in a third-grade classroom explored the idea of using nonfiction mentor texts to assist students in writing their own creative informational texts about animals. By looking at author craft and structure during close reading activities with nonfiction Twin Texts, students were taught how to emulate these techniques in…

In this article, I confine myself to the situation in England that offers a paradigm example of one of the fundamental tensions besetting teaching and assessing writing: the stranglehold of an individualistic view of writing development as opposed to a more socio-cultural perspective. Examining the uses of summative assessment for accountability…

There has been less research on how children learn to spell than on how they learn to read, but a good deal is now known about spelling development. This article reviews studies of normative development, beginning with children's early scribbles and proceeding to prephonological spelling involving letters, phonologically influenced invented…

Storytelling in the classroom has long been recognized for its many benefits, especially as a bridge from orality to literacy. With the changing demographic landscape present in current elementary classrooms across Canada and internationally, storytelling reaps additional benefits for promoting the goals of inclusion among diverse learner…

The psychometric properties of the Kids Intervention Profile (KIP), a rating scale designed to measure academic intervention acceptability from the perspective of students, were examined as well as the influence of background factors on students' acceptability ratings. Data were extracted from 4 randomized controlled trials investigating the…

The story of Enlightenment literacy is often reconstructed from textbooks and manuals, with the implicit focus being what children were reading. But far less attention has been devoted to how they mastered the scribal techniques that allowed them to manage knowledge on paper. Focusing on Scotland, handwritten manuscripts are used to reveal that…

Sentiment analysis is a computational method that automatically analyzes the valence of massive quantities of text. Basic sentiment analysis involves extracting and counting emotionally-laden keywords from passages of text (e.g., "hate," "love," "happy," "sad"). This study describes using sentiment analysis…

We examined how raters and tasks influence measurement error in writing evaluation and how many raters and tasks are needed to reach a desirable level of 0.90 and 0.80 reliabilities for children in Grades 3 and 4. A total of 211 children (102 boys) were administered three tasks in narrative and expository genres, respectively, and their written…

We examined how raters and tasks influence measurement error in writing evaluation and how many raters and tasks are needed to reach a desirable level of 0.90 and 0.80 reliabilities for children in Grades 3 and 4. A total of 211 children (102 boys) were administered three tasks in narrative and expository genres, respectively, and their written…

This article offers a case study account of a garden-themed poetry writing project run by a creative writing organisation in partnership with a class of 9-10-year-old children from a London primary school. I explore the concept of creativity which framed the five-week project and analyse the different ways in which the creative practitioner worked…