• Keep meaning-making and communication the focus of literacy activities;

• Involve all students in reading and writing whole texts despite entry-level skills (e.g., use emergent literacy texts, partner reading, choral reading, and invented spelling so that all children can become successful participants immediately)

• Develop word recognition, phonics, grammatical, and spelling skills in the context of learned or familiar texts (e.g., choral reading, morning message); then reinforce in skills contexts.

• Involve students in writing and reading for multiple purposes and audiences;

• Make learning purposeful by having students participate in literacy activities as a means to an end (e.g., writing as a means to communicate with others or publish; reading or writing as a means to learn or share with the community).

• Provide public occasions for children to share and communicate oral and written texts (e.g., author's/reader's chair).

• Provide frequent occasions for student-to-student talk so children are aware of the knowledge and experiences of the members of the community;

• Foster stuents' awareness of their right, roles and responsibilities as authors, readers, respondents, listeners and informants in the community;

• Acknowledge children's authorship of ideas and oral/written texts;

• Promote conditions where students seek assistance from peers rather than teachers;

• Provide some choices and control over what children read, write, and learn about.;

• Engender respect for children's ideas and risk-taking attempts.

• Model and provide children with access to a language for thinking and for talking about literacy, since language mediates learning, knowledge and thought;

• Involve students in collaborative reading and writing activities that further their use of thinking and problem-solving strategies, while promoting students' active use of a language for talking about literacy;

• Promote student-to-student talk and discussions designed to enhance students' sense of community, and ownership of ideas;

• Promote social interchange among students, involving the sharing of ideas, the sharing of oral and written forms of literacy, the publication of texts or ideas;

• Communicate that all children are authors, readers and informants in the community; provide opportunities for children to become experts and to share expertise; and recognize children by name for their authorship and contributions;

• Involve children in consensus-building and decision-making activities so that they have some authority over the literacy curriculum , and the text construction or comprehension processes.

• Model the strategies and language of literacy, but transfer control of classroom discourse from teachers to students so that students are engaging in the cognitive work of literacy (e.g., moving from teacher modeling, to having a group jointly perform the literacy task, to having a student independently perform the literacy task); use reciprocal dialogues;

• Bridge the gap between personal and text knowledge during literacy activities, and between home and school experiences, languages, and cultures; Understand and respect diversity;

• Instruct students on a moment-to-moment basis, responding to confusion and providing support on a continuing and evolving basis based on what students know and don't know; use the discourse as a basis for making instructional decisions;

• Create opportunities for students to direct and monitor the discourse and literacy process (e.g., student-run groups; students directing teacher, reciprocal dialogues, etc.);

• Scaffold performance by adding instructional support (e.g., maps, strategies, peer assistance) when it is needed and on a case-by-case basis; however, there exists an inherent tension between providing sufficient support and eliminating that support as students acquire proficiency;

• Assess performance in dynamic ways in the context of the literacy activities to determine where a student is performing during instruction, and adjust support accordingly;

• Use language tools and strategies flexibly to remain responsive to students' needs, capabilities, interests, and errors;

• Assume that all students are capable learners, and find ways to meet students in their zones of proximal development. rather than expect students to conform to the curriculum goals;

• Support students by moving from whole-class reading and writing activities, to collaborative arrangements where students can get support from the group, to individual performance.

• Offer choices and options so that the curriculum accommodates diversity and reflexively responds to the evolving development al and literacy needs of children in the community, and so that students are empowered to be in control of their literacy learning.

• Integrate and interrelate the literacy domains in the thematic units, e.g., students should discuss what they know about a topic, read about the topic to acquire more information, write about the topic, and then share their written stories. In this way, oral and written forms of discourse have symbiotic, interdependent relationships that are inseparable in the school curriculum.

• Strategies that are introduced in one context (e.g., using story structure to summarize stories), should be enacted and used in other contexts (e.g., using story structure to write stories).

• Teach learning-to-learn strategies (e..g, brainstorming or predicting, organizing, writing drafts, gathering information from multiple sources, summarizing, generating questions, examining evidence, supporting opinions, and communicating knowledge to others);

• Teach varied text structures and genres (e.g., narrative, expository genres), and the purposes and meaning of these genres;

• Teach strategies for regulating and monitoring performance (e.g., using think-alouds to model questioning strategies; as well as self-monitoring, rereading, editing strategies, etc.);

• Teach problem-solving and thinking in literacy activities as a routine means to an ends, rather than present activities as tasks to be memorized or rotely performed;

• Involve children in evaluating texts, seeing connections, monitoring and explaining processes, and making judgments about ideas and texts;

• Assess students in terms of their ability to take control of the classroom discourse, their ability to internalize and employ a language for talking about literacy, and their ability to use ideas from multiple sources and people (i.e., intertextuality),