'Esta pagina me recordo': Young Latinas Using Personal Life Stories as Tools for Meaning-Making

Because schools place such high importance on text-based analysis often devoid of opportunities to draw on home knowledge, diverse ways of making meaning from books are often ignored. This qualitative study of a bilingual second-grade classroom examined the manner in which four young Latina students told stories about their life experiences in order to make meaning from the books they read for literature discussions. The findings illuminate that the stories told by the young Latinas were told for specific purposes; to make sense of their own and others' life's experiences, as responses to questions, connections to texts, and connections to each other. The study speaks to the necessity to include children's talk in all classrooms, particularly those with a high Latino population. (Contains 1 table and 1 footnote.)