The nature of the literacy assessments valued in the persistent accountability climate within U.S. public education, coupled with an increasingly polarized discourse around what counts as the science of reading (SOR), have resulted in instructional gatekeeping that privileges constrained skill teaching and learning in K-3 settings. The gatekeeper…

Through analysis of the language, this study aimed to investigate the current practice of using songs in public library storytimes. Language interactions in 68 storytime programs involving 652 child participants were observed and transcribed. Then, textual analysis was conducted to examine the language of singing songs, focusing on how language…

The purpose of this study was to examine the outcomes of a home-based, repeated reading intervention in which texts are matched to children's school-based instructional reading level. Results indicated that across the five cases, improvements were evident in reading accuracy, rate, and fluency for the take-home texts and all participants'…

Lack of representation of children from nondominant cultural and linguistic backgrounds continues to be problematic in children's literature, and especially within early literacy texts for beginning readers. One remedy is for children to tell their own stories through the language experience approach, which can then be printed into culturally…

COVID-19 has changed the daily lives of families, impacted on work, social interactions, and mental health. Since spring 2020, parents have been working from home and children have been home from daycare and school. Parents are experiencing stress in an attempt to satisfy the demands of work, family, and COVID-19 concerns. Due to the fact that…

This article examines the unfolding joy in young children's literacy practices in a Finnish early years classroom. We focus on the unfolding of joy in intra-action among children, adults and materials during literacy learning endeavours by thinking with "new" materialist theories, and the data from an early years multiliteracies project…

This longitudinal study documents a trilingual child's struggle with decoding and word recognition, the remedies sought to help him start reading in his second language (English) while he was in French immersion, and his performance after the intervention on tests of phonological awareness in L1 Romanian, L2 English, and L3 French. The study…

Drawing from a network case study, this article traces enactments of a letter writing enquiry in one Kindergarten public school classroom in New York City, and in doing so, explores both the affordances and limitations of sociomaterial approaches employed by the researcher towards school literacies. Looking down at one morning meeting revealed…

The case study, H is For Hurricane and M is For Maria explores the public Montessori System of Puerto Rico as an educational philosophy of resilience. The authors present a counternarrative to early literacy development on the island by focusing in on two public Montessori schools from Vieques, Puerto Rico. The study was conducted one year after…

Communication and literacy development of young children is shaped by the nature of social and cultural relationships in everyday situations. Few studies, however, have explored early story experiences encountered by infants and toddlers in naturalistic settings. We argue that personal stories about everyday lived experiences are a vital context…

As the world came to grips with the coronavirus diseases (COVID-19), educational institutions and the society at large faced the challenge of figuring out how to continue with teaching and learning in such a context. Many countries, including South Africa made efforts to help contain and suppress the spread of COVID-19. In the South African…

This article examines spatiality in selected children's books about COVID-19. Spatiality is an important lens because the coronavirus pandemic is a crisis related to distancing and mobility restrictions--spatial matters. Benedict Anderson's notion of imagined communities was adopted as a framework to how children's books present community…

This article explores a 4-year-old recent immigrant and emergent bilingual child's encounter with voice search technology to understand how assemblages among a young immigrant child, his voice, his family, digital technology, and materials create new possibilities for the understanding of ethnolinguistically marginalized children and families'…

In this article we explore how digital play as conducted through various social media and online meeting platforms facilitated resiliency and confidence building in children during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using day-in-the-life methodology and narrative inquiry, we disseminate and examine observations collected on children aged 2-10 during lockdown…

This paper offers a nuanced perspective of two families' lockdown literacy journeys with their young children during the COVID 19 pandemic. We present informal home learning examples stimulated by play and by school-sanctioned synchronous and asynchronous activities from homes geographically miles apart yet close in terms of shared experience. In…