Teaching disciplinary literacy in the elementary classroom provides rich potential for bridging the literacy-content divide, building background knowledge, extending learning, and deepening student thinking. This article explores how six elementary teachers tried and tested approaches to embedding literacy in three very different subjects:…

The purpose of this article was to offer guidance to educators in evaluating the strengths, weaknesses, and most effective uses of commercial reading assessment suites. We provide three resources to help educators who are responsible for making instructional decisions in reading using formal screening, benchmark, interim, and progress-monitoring…

Because dual-language books (DLBs) print the entire text in two languages nearby on the page, they have great potential for supporting children's biliteracy development by providing contexts to compare/contrast languages. However, little is known about how children read DLBs independently and how they may/may not use such characteristics to…

Informational texts present complex content using language that is simultaneously technical, abstract, dense, and authoritative. This article describes practical strategies to support teachers in using informational picture books to prepare upper elementary school students for navigating the complex language demands necessitated by expository…

Although orally sharing and discussing written compositions has been shown to benefit elementary students, it can be challenging to entwine this additional pedagogy with an already full literacy instructional period. This article acknowledges these challenges and outlines three evidence-based instructional modifications to encourage active sharing…

This article offers a framework for more equitable classroom reading assessment known as a Critical Assessment Practices (CAPS) approach. CAPS includes a set of four principles that teachers can use to partner with, and to empower, students to support more equitable and informative classroom-based reading assessment. Teachers can apply the CAPS…

This article describes a comprehensive framework (iDISC) for the close reading of informational texts for elementary students that may need additional language, social, memory, or behavioral supports. The article introduces concrete tools that are used before, during, and after close reading, including cue-cards, language stems, discussion…

Connecting literacy to social issues such as gender stereotypes supports reading and writing achievement while also allowing students to think critically and in justice-focused ways. Such practices allow students to critique gender stereotypes in texts while also examining and even challenging their own implicit perceptions of gender. However,…

Offering insights from a research-practice partnership, we examine how five pre-K-6 teachers discussed using LGBTQ+-inclusive children's literature as backup to counter curricular censorship and community pushback.

Students in the 3rd and 4th grade often encounter what has been called a reading "slump" when their class curriculums increasingly ask them to comprehend and learn from texts. Students are more likely to struggle if they have not been offered sufficient opportunities to build world and domain knowledge and engage in challenging…

Offering a heuristic to apprentice young children into the disciplines, we examine how one multiage classroom teacher leveraged the resources of personal digital inquiry to forward students' knowledge building.

Vocabulary knowledge plays a critical role in supporting text comprehension and broader learning across the school day. While school offers opportunities to build vocabulary knowledge, studies have shown that very little time is devoted to vocabulary instruction at the elementary level. This may be, in part, because educators commonly report being…

In this article we report the results and classroom implications of a qualitative study that explored third-grade students' interactions with each other as they partner read. Participants included 10 students, each of whom engaged in three readings with a partner during recorded observations. All students had been taught structures for partner…

Reading comprehension is contingent upon the integration of various reading skills, including word reading, reading fluency, and comprehension strategies. Students who encounter challenges in both word reading and reading comprehension present an opportunity for growth across multiple reading-related domains. Recent intervention data, as…

One strategy for developing science literacy and scientific literacy in young children is through published trade books. To better understand how science literacy and scientific literacy may be represented in elementary classrooms, we investigated children's books that explore science concepts. Specifically, we examined high-quality science trade…