This academic service learning initiative enabled teacher education candidates to create research-based family literacy activities around a diverse selection of children's books. Each project included a detailed parent or caregiver letter, which provides an overview of the family literacy activity; materials and props; step-by-step procedures;…

As K-5 dual language programs gain popularity in the United States, language teaching, however, often still prioritizes discrete and decontextualized learning that is not built on students' interests and experiences or their multilingual and multimodal resources. This article reports on a classroom-based ethnographic case study and illustrates how…

Building on existing research applying app maps (Israelson, 2015), the authors take an ideological orientation to broaden app evaluations and consider participatory literacies, social and communicational practices relevant to children's everyday digitally mediated lives. Drawing from their North American elementary classroom studies on children's…

When response activities and comprehension strategies are combined, classroom instruction can enhance student engagement and understanding of a text, enrich student response, and improve students' awareness of their own strategic reading. This article presents some activities, adapted from the new IRA book "Children's Literature in the Reading…

Describes a summer remedial reading program for first-grade students. Includes discussions of the activities and strategies used to promote comprehension, fluency, and vocabulary development. (FL)

Proposes five "creative comprehension" strategies designed to challenge both gifted as well as average students. (FL)

Describes an Environmental Reading Program, in which students come to realize that they are readers of their surroundings. Shows how the program can stimulate thought processes and promote comprehension. (FL)

Offers suggestions from five contributors regarding a calendar of reading activities related to bird observation, a way of involving parents in helping children with reading difficulties, formation of a special club for Title I children, an exercise in vocabulary development, and the value of using music to teach reading. (ET)

Offers five reading activities for classroom use, including "Poetry in Motion" (Janet Millar Grant); "Book-a-Mania" (Maria Ramirez Zirkelback); "Signs of Life" (Karl A. Matz); "Football and Reading Do Mix!" (Cindy Visser); and "Poetry-of-the-Month Club" (Steven Schneider). (MG)

Suggestions from eight contributors include the following: how to use pattern books with beginning readers, how to develop a locally relevant basic sight word list, how to use learning styles in individualizing instruction, and how to personalize handouts. (FL)

Contains suggestions from six contributors, including the use of parents as an audience for beginning readers; outdoor activities to motivate readers; word order recognition exercise; a books-by-mail library service for rural students; using remedial students to read to younger children; and a language arts/social studies project. (FL)