Forms part of a themed issue describing "Parent-Kid-Teacher Investigators," a program in which parents, children, and teachers gather regularly to use language and literacy for action research projects. Discusses ways in which schools and families are alike in building a supportive environment for learning. Illustrates conditions contributing to…

Discusses the life and artwork of Charles Burchfield, particularly focusing on his depiction of nature, watercolor techniques, and use of symbolism in his artwork entitled "Arctic Owl and Winter Moon." Provides lessons for philosophy, visual arts, music, natural science, language arts, and astronomy. (CMK)

Highlights the life of Leonard Koscianski, an artist who focuses on revealing the inner life of the human heart and mind in his artwork. Includes four lesson plans for grades ranging from 2 through 12: philosophy, psychology, language arts, and visual arts. Provides a copy and background about Koscianski's painting "Red Fish." (CMK)

Presents an open letter to English teachers outlining what the author hopes English teachers will teach his children about books and reading this year, focused on helping them love reading. Includes some thoughts about how to do so. Presents short annotations of 11 new or overlooked young adult books worth reading. (SR)

Describes how one 8th-grade English language arts teacher works to keep her students as the primary focus in her curriculum. Discusses how she uses a class council to connect with literature, discuss upsetting issues or incidents, and solve problems. Outlines activities that further the social and emotional learning component of her curriculum.…

Describes a successful strategy that develops critical thinking in middle school classrooms via an intersection of character education, adolescent literature, and authentic assessment. Describes the procedure in which students explore the literature to determine how positive and negative character traits are demonstrated, with discussions on these…

Presents a study on the implementation of a constructivist approach to using multimedia technology in two advanced language arts classrooms in a public middle school. Because the principal content consisted of written material, the authors examined pre- to posttest improvement in writing ability as measured by trained raters of essays.…

Provides background information on Rene Magritte and his work. Offers an activity in which elementary and middle school students can learn about Magritte's sky and silhouette series of painted wine bottles. Explains that the lesson should be used when students are learning about poetry in language arts classes. (CMK)

While not all gifted children love reading and writing and they do not all have access to books or grow up in literary families the great majority of these children crave the rich and imaginative world that literacy has to offer. Differences in culture, age, and geography influence this love of storytellers, poets, songwriters, and novelists, but…

Journal writing has been used for a long time in the classroom as a part of an integrated approach to teaching literature. There are several different types of journals: (1) reading response journals, in which students react to what they have read; (2) lifebooks, which are similar to diaries or personal journals; and (3) dialog journals, in which…

This paper reviews the work on gendered achievement in the English-speaking Caribbean, with its often explicit focus on underachieving males. However, patterns of gendered achievement are more likely region-specific and variegated in some contexts. In Trinidad and Tobago, the full-scale implementation of national assessments in 2004 provided an…

Eight experienced Chinese language arts teachers from a typical junior high school in Taiwan participated in this study to discuss the potential uses of information and communications technologies (ICT) in Chinese language arts instruction. After meeting for 12 roundtable sessions and using a web forum as a supplement for exchanging ideas, they…

The purpose of this study was to track the development of fifth-graders' reading and writing skills in the context of ecosystems science content using an action research design. A collection of students' work, a researcher journal, video-taped class sessions, student science journals and a weekly book choice checklist were used as data sources.…

A time of upheaval and innovation, the American Colonial Period (1600-1775) was marked by New World settlers' struggles to adapt to a life that lacked anything familiar or prefabricated. The period provides a rich opportunity to study the contributions of the colonists across multiple disciplines. In the fall of 2003, a team of eighth-grade…

"Wahkohtowin," a Cree word meaning kinship or the state of being related, is a fundamental concept for understanding Indigenous culture and traditional beliefs (Ermine 2001). This article describes how three researchers in western Canada incorporated this concept into a research project that compared Indigenous and non-Indigenous…