Using examples from family letters sent to the Department of Education's Elementary Correspondence School (ECS) in the western Canadian province of British Columbia in the early twentieth century, this article discusses three potential problems or traps associated with concepts of agency in the history of children and youth. Following a brief…

This study explored how developmentally appropriate practices influenced the affordances of a multitouch surface in an early childhood classroom. Children, ages 4 to 5 years old, were videotaped while engaged in a storymaking application on a multitouch table. As a result of the study, we found that some challenges with the functionality…

A speech-language pathologist and former primary teacher who is now a researcher conducting action research with kindergarten teachers in northern rural Canadian classrooms collaborate in an analysis of one teacher's interactions with her students in a dramatic play center. We use three principles to show how the teacher supports children's…

In this research article, Haeny Yoon and Tran Nguyen Templeton explore the challenges of listening to children in both classrooms and research that purports to center young children. Through two stories from their respective studies, Yoon and Templeton highlight the complexities of following children's leads given the competing agendas situating…

Print in the environment is typically posted in early childhood classrooms. However, the print that exists is often not meaningful to children, and teachers rarely engage children in using the print. This is a missed opportunity to support children's writing. This article presents research-based ideas for engaging children with meaningful print in…

This article describes the ways in which a class of 7- and 8-year-old children used writing to communicate. Using Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics as a theoretical frame, I examine what functions these messages served, how functions varied from child to child and how the practice of message-sending evolved over time. Analysis of data…

Early writing is important to young children's development--research indicates that writing is predictive of later reading and writing. Despite this, preschool teachers often do not focus on writing and offer limited scaffolding to foster children's writing development. This article shares innovative ways to scaffold early writing across the three…

This is one teacher's story about teaching writing. It describes and explains how Mickey (the second author) encouraged her young writers (6-7-year-olds) to collaborate with their peers "to make their writing even better". The article describes how the teacher, Mickey, redesigned her writing lessons to further scaffold beginner writers.…

Early writing is important to young children's development -- research indicates that writing is predictive of later reading and writing. Despite this, preschool teachers often do not focus on writing and offer limited scaffolding to foster children's writing development. This article shares innovative ways to scaffold early writing across the…

In spite of views that children's writing development is in large part a linguistic complex process involved in their engagement within and across social activities in and out of school, the literature is scant on the wide range of semiotic resources that children may draw on to animate their poetry writing and performances. Drawing from a case…

To fully consider the potential of informational texts to serve as mentor texts in the elementary classroom, the authors propose an inquiry about the intersections among the author's intentions, instructional contexts, a teacher's approaches, and students' responses to informational texts when contemplating the roles these texts might serve. In…

Print in the environment is typically posted in early childhood classrooms. However, the print that exists is often not meaningful to children, and teachers rarely engage children in using the print. This is a missed opportunity to support children's writing. This article presents research-based ideas for how to create and engage children with…

Creativity isn't formally assessed or evaluated on tests or report cards, so teachers rarely plan lessons that encourage it. In fact, many teachers unintentionally stifle children's creativity when they cut off student's oral responses or stop them from adding more to their work so that they can bring the class back to the task at hand. Instead,…

The goals of this study were twofold: first, to examine whether preschool children's name-writing proficiency differentiated them on other emergent reading and writing tasks, and second, to examine the effect of name length on preschool children's emergent literacy skills including alphabet knowledge and spelling. In Study 1, a range of emergent…

The new "Common Core State Standards" (CCSS) (NGACBP & CCSSO, 2010) require teachers to prepare all learners, including adolescent English learners (ELs), to develop academic literacy practices. This article describes an instructional intervention in an urban public high school using the genre-based "Reading to Learn" (Rose…