Step into Ms. Jones's classroom to see how thoughtful planning and carefully chosen instructional practices foster students' collaboratively developed understandings during interactive read-alouds.What all children need, and some need more of, is models, explanations, and demonstrations of how reading is accomplished. (Allington & Cunningham, 2007, p. 54 Ms. Jones waited for students to study the cover, think about their ideas, and craft their responses. "I think it will be all about lions, like where they live, what they eat, how they hunt," Malik offered. "I think it will be about how lions are the strongest and fiercest animals in Africa," Claire added. Ms. Jones replied, Those are some great ideas about this text. Turn and tell your partner what kinds of information you think this text will include and how it might be organized. You can think about some of the things your classmates have said, or you can share different ideas.The noise level in the room quickly elevated as the students shared their thoughts with one another.After students shared their predictions about the information in the text, Ms. Jones shared a few of the comments she heard from the partners. As she repeated some of the statements, she continually pointed back to the image of the lion on the cover, demonstrating the importance of locating evidence in the text. Ms. Jones noted that most of the partners used words like ferocious and dangerous to describe lions. She then turned the text over and read the blurb about the authors on the back cover. She highlighted that the husband-and-wife team have studied lions for more than 25 years and are dedicated to conserving places and creatures. Ms. Jones focused her students' attention on that statement and asked them to think about whether or not that changed their predictions about the text. Ms. Jones shared her idea that the text was going to include facts about lions. She showed students a sticky note on which she had written "facts about lions." Ms. Jones then shared another idea about the text:Based on what I just read about the authors, I also thought that this text could be about how lions should be respected. Here is a sticky note with this idea. Which do you think is a better prediction about the main idea FEATURE ARTICLE

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The outcome of a multidisciplinary and iterative process, the LIT KIT is a portable, cyber-physical artifact supporting children's picture-book reading. The LIT KIT follows from the hypothesis that children's literacy can be advanced in a tangible, co-creative environment that is both physical and digital. The LIT KIT employs color, sound and movement to scaffold meaning-making through the creation of an environment that is evocative of the picture-book being read. Designed with a Sifteo TM cube [16] interface, the LIT KIT creates room-scaled audio-visual and spatial effects to both contextualize language and provide feedback during dialogical interactions between a child and an adult reader. Children can customize the LIT KIT settings to actively interpret the ideas, concepts and environments inherent in the picture-book's words and images. The LIT KIT is an outreach component, for home or classroom use, of our developing roomscaled LIT ROOM for a major public library. Presented here are motivations for the LIT KIT, and an elaboration of its design and development. Usability evaluations have begun and continue, as we further the prototype with expected completion in Summer 2013.

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