Language Arts
Vol. 96, No. 6, July 2019
Teachers often feel unprepared when faced with a student’s grief within their classroom; however, given grief’s pervasiveness, it is imperative that teachers, with whom bereaved students spend the majority of their school time, have resources to use. This article draws upon interviews with four educators who shared children’s picturebooks about grief with elementary student and adult audiences. Organized around three guiding questions—why is it important to share these books with students, when is it best to do that, and how?—their experiences illuminate insights, tensions, and strategies these educators utilized to engage their respective audiences in open-ended discussions and to create opportunities to collaboratively and constructively enter into conversations about death, dying, and grief.
Talk to Read and Write: Using Speech-Recognition Apps in a First-Grade Writing Center
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Language Experience Approach research indicates that students can make significant literacy strides when they read stories they dictate to teachers. However, in a classroom setting, it is unreasonable for teachers to take dictation from each student. Advances in speech recognition allow students to dictate to mobile devices and see their oral words magically transformed into written text. Students no longer have to wait for a teacher in order to see their personally meaningful, linguistically rich, culturally relevant compositions become written words. This is the story of my year as a teacher’s aide in a first-grade classroom where I supervised a writing center in which students used speech-recognition apps on their iPads to compose. The purpose of this article is to share the pedagogical decisions I made, describe the affordances and challenges that emerged, and make recommendations that may support students who use apps to talk to read and write.
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The article addresses the disparity in language and literacy resources among Asian immigrant and refugee students and its implications for classroom instruction and policy making.
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This article turns to one child’s literacies to explore concepts from affect theory and how those ideas can support critical, relational pedagogies in literacy classrooms.
Children’s Literature Reviews 2018 Notable Poetry Books for Children [FREE ACCESS]
In this column, we feature some of our favorite poetry titles for children published in 2018.
Perspectives on Practice Getting to Know Newcomers with Translingual Practice [FREE ACCESS]
This Perspective on Practice describes how translingual practice can support teachers in getting to know newcomer students beginning to develop proficiency in English.
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