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Visual and verbal literacy skills are crucial to children because of their relationship to reading, and to adults because of their social utility. Such skills are, paradoxically, among those least often developed in a systematic fashion in elementary schools. One reason for this is that component subskills of visual and verbal literacy are infrequently identified. The three subskills identified in this paper are describing, comparing, and oral valuing. An effective way of encouraging children to learn these skills is to use illustrations from children's literature. The approach offers many advantages because illustrations are easy to locate, plentiful, and of much interest to children. The teacher attempting to use this approach will find that children respond eagerly and in the process develop valuable visual and verbal literacy skills. (TS)

This paper argues that storytelling needs to be reexamined in light of the changing nature of the elementary school. The problems of storytelling are discussed and five teaching procedures are offered: it is important for the teacher to read several stories before selecting one; the story must be divided into units of action; those sections of the story which need to be memorized verbatim should be identified; the story must be rehearsed; and progress should be monitored, usually by means of a tape recorder. There are three reasons why children should experience stories which are told, rather than read: students should gain an understanding about the oral tradition in literature; telling stories provides active involvement for children; and storytelling acts as a valuable stimulus for children to begin telling stories on their own. (TS)

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how children can consciously examine the composition process and experience a set of problems designed to improve their writing ability. An approach to writing is outlined which is based on the assumption that writing is a skill that can be learned and improved upon. Examined are such topics as the development of skills; the importance of literature as a model and teaching method; the treatment of literature; characterization; language and characterization; point of view; the sense of place; and ideas about plot. It is argued that specific exercises relating to point of view, describing environments, parallel plot construction, and plot completion lead to deeper understandings of the writing process. In this program, children encounter all types of literature as they respond to the challenge of developing writing skills. (TS)

Excluding poetry, number, wordless, alphabet, and information books, this paper discusses the work of 10 visually significant picture book illustrators who published in the 1980s. The books included in the paper, both traditional tales and modern stories, were illustrated by Anthony Browne, Henrik Drescher, Lois Ehlert, Stephen Gammell, Ivan Gantschev, Adrienne Kennaway, Dayal Kaur Khalsa, Deborah Nourse Lattimore, Robert Rayevsky, and Ed Young. The paper also includes a discussion of significant picture books in the 1980s by other illustrators arranged by historical and instructional significance and by the medium used. A list of featured books, arranged by illustrator, is attached. (RS)

A study was conducted to determine how effectively children write when motivated by viewing a work of art and what kind of art they would choose most frequently for motivation. A group of 55 students from second, fourth, and eighth grade classrooms were selected to respond to reproductions of familiar paintings with either fictional or factual writing. After an introductory session during which the students discussed and wrote about a teacher-selected painting, students were free to select pictures of their choice from a group of 15 reproductions. The most frequently chosen piece was a realistic painting called "The Country School" by Winslow Homer. Since students were not questioned as to their reasons for choosing their pictures, the results of the study were inconclusive. (Extensive samples of student writing are included.) (AEA)

Reading teachers should choose activities and experiences for the classroom that are central to reading. Although a sense of security surrounds the teaching of testable finite reading skills, it is necessary to choose language arts experiences that are not so readily evaluated but still are basic to reading. Listening instruction can facilitate reading improvement; this includes analyzing the listening environments of classrooms, helping children develop the ability to discriminate messages from background noise, and planning experiences in which students listen for sequence, anticipate the speaker, determine meanings, and evaluate the message. Oral language instruction should teach subskills in the following ways: develop syntactic skills by providing experiences in combining, expanding, and transforming sentences; help children enrich their vocabularies; teach the use of stress, pitch, and juncture; and provide instruction in the use of kinesics, proxemics, and haptics in oral communication. Dramatics and exposure to literature have much to offer in enhancing reading instruction; and composition activities, including writing and group editing, help children clarify and shape their thinking abilities and yield insight into the nature of the writing process. (DF)

Choral reading can be used by teachers to enhance children's appreciation for poetry and to develop their personal, social, psychological, cognitive/affective, and language values. It is useful for teachers to begin by creating an awareness in children of the basic elements of choral reading: tempo, rhythm, pitch, stress, and juncture. Then an arrangement of the work to be read must be made: the reading can be in unison, antiphonal, cumulative, or by single voices. In presenting a sequence of choral speaking skills, teachers might begin with repetition of sounds, then go to repeated refrains, simple unison reading, and finally to small group work. The poem must be scored so that groups and individuals will know when to speak, and it should be marked so that all agree on the emphasis. In many poems, it is possible to create a verbal obbligato to provide a background appropriate to the poem. (TJ)

Intended for use by reading teachers, this document presents classroom activities for using drama as an aid to reading comprehension. Following a brief introduction discussing the rationale for drama in the reading classroom, the paper details various phases in comprehension, matching each level with suggested books and appropriate dramatic activities. The second half of the document presents the books and activities in outline form. A bibliography of the suggested books concludes the paper. (HTH)