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Australian early childhood education positions literacy learning as a set of social practices contextualised by one's unique experiences and knowledges. Despite widespread agreement about the need to teach phonics and other code-breaking practices, the ways early childhood educators integrate "constrained" skills are not well understood outside the education profession. Current public discourse is generating ever-increasing pressure for the adoption of explicit teaching of phonics, however, teaching skills in isolation from reading and writing can be problematic, especially for marginalised learners. Challenges lie not only in learning to apply skills later but also in the impingement on time for more sophisticated concepts such as comprehension or vocabulary. This paper's focus on pedagogies in early childhood educational settings prior to compulsory formal school sits within a larger project examining literacy demands for learners across school. In this paper, we argue for greater recognition of early childhood educators' expertise in planning for and facilitating a diversity of practices that can address all learners' needs.

Picture books are an important and accessible form of visual art for children because they offer, among other things, opportunities for making connections to personal experiences and to the values and beliefs of families and communities. This paper reports on the use of a picture book to promote Year 4 students' making of text-to-self connections, which they expressed through visual art. "A funds of knowledge" (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez,1992) lens was used to analyse the representation of students' out-of-school lives and experiences within the artworks. In this paper, we argue for a pedagogical approach that creates opportunities for children to respond to picture books through visual art, identifying artworks as powerful avenues of insight into children's funds of knowledge that can inform literacy pedagogy.

Supportive digital resources are key to supporting educators' pedagogic practices in teaching children to be literate. But locating suitable resources can be confusing, with as claims about products being educational, aligned with curriculum outcomes, and even as 'silver bullets'. In Australia, a lack of specificity in national and state curriculum guidelines about resource selection creates inconsistencies within and across schools. We investigate how teacher-selected digital resources are used in early childhood classrooms to support literacy learning. Drawing on three independent Australian classroom-based studies, we share three examples of children engaging with digital resources. Together, they show that not all digital resources promote active and engaged literacy learning in meaningful and socially interactive contexts. We propose principles for selecting digital resources to promote playful, scaffolded, and exploratory literacy learning.

Reading and creating stories is a longstanding pedagogical approach to literacy learning in elementary school classrooms because stories offer personal and human experiences to which students can relate and respond. Stories, including digital forms such as short films, offer accounts of what it is to belong to a community and its worldviews and practices. Opportunities to identify, challenge, and respond to these views in the creation of their own texts develop in students broadened understandings of themselves and others. This teaching tip reports on Australian grade 6 students responding to messages they identified in a short film. The students used iPads to plan, create, and share stories that convey alternative perspectives on the messages they identified.

Storytelling is a practice that enables children to apply their literacy skills. This article shares a collaborative literacy strategy devised to enable children to create multimodal stories about their familiar school environment. The strategy uses resources, including the children's own drawings, images from Google Maps, and the Puppet Pals Director's Pass app, to leverage children's experiences in their school and community contexts for a meaningful and authentic literacy learning opportunity. The children use both paper-based materials and digital technologies to create multimodal stories. The process and work samples are provided to illustrate the strategy in practice.