For Garth, these connections formulate how he prefers to teach, learn, and social-ize. He also indicated that he did not find value in the reading and writing activities teachers assigned.

We have seen a disturbing tendency in recent years for certain strategies to become overused to the point of diminishing returns (e.g., predicting outcomes). The time students spend predicting what will happen next on the basis of the pictures should not swamp the time spent reading and comprehend-ing the text.

In that study, teachers were assigned at random to introduce a set of strategies briefly and then quickly move students to applying or juggling multiple strategies simultaneously, which resulted in students with stronger performance on some measures.

. One study found that second and third graders whose teachers engaged them in reading and writing texts more like those you would find outside of school, for rea-sons similar to those for which people read and write outside of school, showed higher growth in reading comprehension;

The possibility exists that by emphasizing generic reading instruction at the expense of disciplinary learning, we may be, as the saying goes, cutting off our noses to spite our faces

The program’s fun-damental premise is that reading, writing, and language (e.g., vocabulary, discourse) are best developed when they are put to work as tools to help students acquire knowledge and inquiry skill in a specific domain, such as science

Writers of narratives often omit the motives that drive characters to particular actions in a story on precisely the grounds that they expect readers to use their knowledge of stories, life experiences, and human nature to infer those motives.

Morris and Perney (1984) found that first grader’sinvented spellings were a better predictor of end-of-grade reading than a standardized readingreadiness test.

If you canidentify your students by the stages of reading, writing, and spelling, then you willknow

If you canidentify your students by the stages of reading, writing, and spelling, then you willknow

What students do correctly—an independent or easy level2.What students use but confuse—an instructional level where instruction is mosthelpful3.What is absent in students’ spelling—a frustration level where spelling concepts aretoo difficultT

It is not the case that students abandon sound once theymove to the more efficient use of patterns, or abandon patterns once they move to themore efficient use of morphology.

It is not the case that students abandon sound once theymove to the more efficient use of patterns, or abandon patterns once they move to themore efficient use of morphology.

Students and adult learners move from using but confusing elements ofsound, to using but confusing elements of pattern, to using but confusing elements ofmeaning.

The best way to develop fast and accurate perception of word features is to engage inmeaningful reading and writing, and to have multiple opportunities to examine thosesame words out of context.

In contrast, the more-well-off students progressively build on their achievements. In this way, digital media — much like print literacy — can make “the rich richer and the poor poorer.”

novices need experiences (diSessa, 2000) to marry to words to give them concrete meanings. This will start them on the path to more general meanings as they have more experiences and find patterns within them

novices need experiences (diSessa, 2000) to marry to words to give them concrete meanings. This will start them on the path to more general meanings as they have more experiences and find patterns within them

They walk the walk and talk the talk and, in the process, master the tool kit, coming to see the real world in a new way.

If we could just entice kids to role-play such professions we would get school-based skills, learning for innovation, and a recipe for a new pedagogy. But what would entice them? Shaffer’s answer: Let them, beginning at an early age,

One key reason that some children — often, but not always more privileged children — are successful in school with academic language is their early home-based preparation. Many successful students enter kindergarten with a large and varied vocabulary acquired through regular dialogue with parents or grandparents, being read to frequently, and exposure to a wide variety of experiences in the world. Such interac-tions are crucial

What gives students a good running head start to engage this complex language is a wide-ranging, sturdy vocabulary of complex words in the early years (before age five)

Stated simply, if we don’t create a different approach to literacy in the primary grades, millions of children will never overcome the “slump” that prevents them from becoming fully productive citizens.

The probability that a poor first-grade reader will be a poor reader in the fourth grade is 0.88, and children who are behind in reading in the first grade have only a one-in-eight chance of ever catching up

. Create “a place in every community”: New literacies technology centers

hey can also be used to track how learners learn, moment by moment, so that, eventually, we can give students constant feedback based on our knowledge of various trajectories of learning

The most accurate predictor of school success is the size of a child’s vocabulary at age five of “book” words (words more likely to appear in written texts than in spoken language). This breadth of vocabulary is created by parents talking to children, answering their questions, reading to them, modeling their own pleasure in reading, and offering their children a wide variety of experiences in the world

The fourth-grade slump consistently leads to educational failure. The digital gap leads to a failure to become confidently “tech-savvy,” a 21st-century skill crucial for success, and even for survival

Children cannot feel they belong at school when their valuable home-based practices (like Leona’s) are ignored, denigrated, and unused

Jennie turned a real everyday event—one which we know she had already told in her everyday vernacular language to other adults—into a “literary” story.

What appears to cause it are family, community, and school language environments in which children interact intensively with adults and more advanced peers and experience cognitively challenging talk and texts on sustained topics and in different genres of oral and written language

Poor children suffer the same sort of plight that someone who tries to pass French 4 without French 1, French 2, and French 3 does.

Written language is, at the very best, 6000 to 10,000 years old—too short a time to have gained biological support.

Advocates of Whole Language argue that learning to read is a “natural” process in the same way in which the acquisition of one’s native language is a natural process

Because it is clear that deep learning works better as a cultural process than it does as an instructed process.

But the majority are poor or come from minority groups whose members have faced a history of prejudice and oppression (Snow et al. 1998).