Playing with Texts: Classroom Practices for Enriching Young Readers' Engagement with Texts

This paper explores ways in which teachers may build bridges across children's home, community and school texts. It does so by looking at how children's texts form networks of relationships inside and beyond the text. These relationships significantly shape ways in which a reader interacts with the text in hand, other texts that the text-in- hand calls up, and other texts that the reader brings to bear. Further, these relationships provide teachers with valuable means for bridging children's home, school and community texts and literacy experiences. In exploring these relationships, implications for young readers and for classroom practices are described.