The 2000 and 2003 international studies of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) among all Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries presented disappointing results for Germany's fifteen-year-old students' reading skills. These studies pointed out two necessities for future reform: to extend the school day (instruction generally ends at 1:00 p.m.) and to broaden the variety of learning opportunities offered outside of the traditional classroom. Both recommendations are being forced on schools by means of different measures in light of an institutional model called "Ganztagsschule" (GTS), or "full day school," which extends classes, as in other countries, until 3:00 or even 4:00 p.m. What has been practiced in the United States as writing across the curriculum since the 1970s is key to current school reform in Germany and other European countries. In December 2004, a Writing Resources Center (WRC) in Freiburg shared by an elementary school, middle school, and school for students with special needs (the Albert Schweitzer Schools of Freiburg) began with a six-week project run by the elementary school. Students in third and fourth grade read and analyzed the local daily newspaper together and ran several small group writing projects, which fostered reading comprehension. In these projects a broad variety of texts, pictures, and objects represented the students' efforts to create meaning out of what they had read. Just as the development of full-day schools requires support that extends beyond measures that are internal to the particular school, developing a writing and reading center for primary and/or secondary schools should not be tackled alone. There are now WRCs in several German states, such as Baden-Wurttemberg, Hessen, North Rhein-Westphalia and Saarland. The author of this article has been assisting these schools up until now through coaching in school development issues and specific continuing education workshops of individual colleagues in the area of writing and reading pedagogy.