Language Arts - Volume 84, Issue 1, 2006

Young children create poems, digital photographs, and other artistic creations that reveal the cognitive work, imaginative play, and problem solving that comes as they learn to see themselves as artists.

An eight-year-old boy, Adrian, draws subject matter and formats for his writing from a new, digital medium: the video game.

Fifth-graders explore complicated social issues and create a CD entitled Exploring Freedom.

Two nine-year-old children draw upon a broad range of storytelling resources (voice, print, drawing, digital graphics, music, and video) to position themselves as storytellers in a technology-rich summer literacy class, although the two approach their stories in very different ways.

Eighth-grade students and teachers in a high-poverty school work with members of a local nonprofi t organization to collaboratively create a multi-textual, digital project on poverty and its connections to homelessness.

Siegel looks at what research on literacy has to say about multimodal transformations and what questions we might pursue to understand the possibilities such transformations hold for children’s learning and lives.