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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.

This paper examines the development of professional identity in early career teachers enrolled in an "add-on year" of an undergraduate teacher education degree. Through a series of readings focused on reflection and pedagogy, participants engaged in professional dialogue as they made connections between the themes in their professional readings and their own understanding of the professional practice of a teacher. Dialogue was recorded and shared on a developed website. Participation in this dialogue afforded teachers opportunities to reflect on their professional identity in connection with literature, personal experiences and experiences of others. Further, uploading audio files to the site created a sense of accountability among the teachers to "have something to say", thereby contributing to the community. The authors argue that this use of professional dialogue in both the physical and virtual environment is a valuable approach for promoting reflective capacities and for the development of professional identity. (Contains 2 tables and 1 figure.)

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.

This paper reports on the digital writing practices of a Grade Three primary school student as he used an iPad to plan, produce and share digital texts. The case study acknowledges that writing is undergoing a period of great change in many classrooms and works to show how a student author has interpreted and produced digital texts with new technologies. In particular, the specific practices, digital materials and literacy concepts will be explicated through analyses of two digital texts created by this author. This focus acknowledges the ways texts can be planned, produced and shared using multiple modes and media. These social practices and the wider learning opportunities afforded through the flexible and recursive ways students produce text have yet to be fully explored. This paper also extends current understandings about digital writing practices through its examination of the connections between and among multiple apps as an author crafts digital text.

The ability to ask questions is essential to learning, reasoning, and understanding. This column introduces a sequence of activities that incorporate the use of digital images and online texts into intentional opportunities for even the youngest learners to work with their teachers and classmates as they wonder, anticipate, explore, and think deeply about things that matter to them.

Children should be active participants in the environments in which they engage. However in the prior to school setting, it is not necessarily clear to educators how children understand their role and place within that community. Lave and Wenger's (2005) situated learning theory provides a useful frame to consider this developing sense of membership and the connections children make between home and their prior to school centre. In the spirit of belonging, being and becoming (COAG, 2009), a cohort of 27 children (aged 4-5 years) transitioning to the first year of formal schooling were invited to create a digital story representing their active participation in their centre. Analysis of the ways the children expressed this sense of belonging revealed sound understandings about what it is to be part of the community, the responsibilities this entails and the implications for early years educators.

In this article we introduce a heuristic for orientating to the language content of the Australian Curriculum: English. Our pedagogical heuristic, called "Playing with Grammar", moves through three separate but interwoven stages: (i) an introduction to the learning experience, (ii) a focus on learning, and (iii) an application of new knowledge where students read and/or write with grammar in mind. We draw on aspects of Bernstein's sociological theories to consider the implications of keeping the content of the Language, Literature and Literacy strands together or apart. We also theorise different pedagogical approaches where teachers or learners control the sequence and pacing of content within the learning experience.

The article discusses the evolving nature of reading education, emphasizing the importance of adapting teaching practices to meet changing demands and technologies. It explores the impact of digital technologies on reading, the ways readers access and interact with texts, and the importance of broadening the definition of reading to include both traditional and digital formats.

It is recognised that from a young age children spend considerable portions of their leisure time on the Internet. In Australia a number of child-targeted magazines have associated websites, which have high and ever-increasing readership. We do not yet know the impact of this medium upon children. Overt advertising is evident on webpages, but so too are hidden advertisements in the written text, images and games. This material usually does not comply with existing broadcasting codes of practice for mainstream advertising. This article examines the instances of overt and covert advertisements for food within three websites monitored over a 12-month period. Across this time the authors found 13 examples of overt and 39 examples of covert food advertising. In this article they focus on three example advertisements as they analyse them in response to the following research questions: What examples of overt and covert advertising are evident within websites attached to children's magazines? What messages are presented? The authors discuss the implications this advertising presents for media literacy and the critical reading strategies required by young people as they navigate their way through and make meaning from these digital texts. (Contains 5 tables.)

The changing nature of literacy is well documented within the literature, challenging educators to examine their pedagogies in light of the needs of learners in the current climate. The development and creation of non-linear texts within primary classrooms is of current interest as they reflect the types of texts accessed and created by users of technology and afford children opportunities to make connections between their in and out of school literacy experiences. The authors observed children over extended periods as they collaborated with teachers and peers to author non-linear texts for a range of purposes. Three case studies will be reported, providing examples of how three cohorts of primary school children (one lower primary, one middle primary, one upper primary) responded to the challenge to create texts using Information and Communication Technology and the specific learning observed. What is interesting about these cases is the process that the children engaged with as they planned, constructed and evaluated their texts. This paper describes this process and the implications it presents for what we understand about the pedagogy of writing, the creation of text and the opportunities for providing classroom literacy experiences aimed at supporting and fostering student learning. (Contains 1 table and 3 figures.)