The Experience Corps Program, which was initiated in 1996 in New York's South Bronx, connects retirees with children in elementary schools. The Experience Corps' volunteers, who are mostly lifelong residents of the South Bronx, work a minimum of 15 hours each week throughout the school year as mentors, tutors, and special assistants. Since 1997,…

This book addresses the area of reading and literacy instruction for Spanish-speaking students. Ten chapters focus on the following: (1) "Direct Instruction" (Elva Duran and Douglas Carnine); (2) "Developing the Foundations of Literacy: Oracy" (Elba Maldonado-Colon); (3) "Language Development and Instruction" (Linda…

Project GRAD (Graduation Really Achieves Dreams) is a not-for-profit school-community collaborative designed to improve instructional quality and culture within at-risk feeder school systems in inner cities. This research-based school reform model reforms large urban school systems through incremental expansion, one K-12 feeder cluster at a time.…

Noting that the early enjoyment of reading and writing provides a foundation for a lifetime of ongoing learning, this book details a literacy curriculum for preschool, kindergarten, and first grade. Chapter 1 describes the stages of writing development and discusses how early childhood teachers can facilitate emergent reading and writing. Chapter…

This paper reports on the strategies used by an English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) teacher to help law students whose first language is Chinese in an English-for-law course learn and understand how to negotiate legal texts and ordinances and connect them with the concerns of people in the real world. The example of the recently enacted Human Organ…

This article reports a six-month study that used a matched-pairs pre-test, post-test control group design to measure the relative effectiveness of extensive reading with remedial reading students in a Philippines secondary school (n = 60). Ninety percent of students at the school come from low-income homes where reading materials tend to be…

This report summarizes some AISD activities to support reading and mathematics instruction in grades K-5 for the 2004-2005 school year.

Outlines recommendations for classroom teaching of English as a second language and the national language, Malay. It is noted that these recommendations are unlikely to be widely implemented as long as such external factors as a highly structured syllabus and an emphasis on written work remain in place. Khalid's response addresses the issue of…

An inquiry-based curriculum can become the vehicle for bringing students out into the community and bringing the larger world to the classroom. The article describes one Hawaiian teacher's elementary curriculum that encouraged talking, sharing, and collaboration and incorporated reading and writing for real purposes into the curriculum. (SM)

The use of coaching to bring research-based teaching practices into general education classrooms to improve reading instruction for students with learning disabilities is explored. Twelve elementary teachers were trained and mentored by consultants and two special education coaches. Special and general educators conceptualized teaching differently…

Provides seven fully developed library media activities that are designed for use with specific curriculum units in art, family life education, reading, language arts, science, and social studies. Library media skills, objectives, grade levels, instructional roles, procedures, evaluation, and follow-up are described for each activity. (LRW)

A qualitative study examined how three urban California school districts and teachers in three case study classrooms interpreted and implemented Proposition 227. School district implementation varied according to district language ideology. Nevertheless, English only policy and accompanying highly scripted reading reforms stripped teachers of…

Provides six library media activities that are designed for use with specific curriculum units in health, science, language arts, and social studies. Each activity identifies library media skills and curriculum objectives, grade levels, resources, instructional roles, procedures, evaluation guidelines, and followup activities. (AEF)

Reading fluency has been identified as one of the necessary components for becoming a strong reader. Instructional techniques designed to improve reading fluency are generally easy to implement. Many parents are eager to assist in the growth of their children's academic skills. This article describes a procedure for improving oral reading fluency…

Constructivism refers to a collection of educational practices that are student-focused, meaning-based, process-oriented, interactive, and responsive to student personal interests and needs. In contrast, instructionism refers to a collection of educational practices that are teacher-focused, skill-based, product-oriented, non-interactive, and…