"Using Comic Art to Improve Speaking, Reading and Writing" uses children's interest in pictures, comics and graphic novels as a way of developing their creative writing abilities, reading skills and oracy. The book's underpinning strategy is the use of comic art images as a visual analogue to help children generate, organise and refine their ideas…

The article describes how to use a word processing program and add-on story starters for different genres to enhance elementary students' creative writing skills. Teachers input story starters, then students select a genre and add on a story version in that genre. Students can also develop their own story starters. (SM)

This article introduces a special section of four papers featuring strategies for improving the story writing skills of elementary and secondary students who have problems with written language. It outlines the elements of story grammar, describes characteristics of students with writing problems, and notes the strategies presented in the four…

First in a series, this booklet contains suggestions for planning literacy in Year 6. This Year 6 plan for 2001-2002 and the short-term unit plan for narrative writing are a distillation of the work of a representative group of Year 6 teachers. It contains the Year 6 Term 1 Units 2 and 5 on Narrative Writing. It begins with an outline of the basic…

Forty-two inner city intermediate-grade learning-disabled students wrote fables when provided with the following stimuli: story starter, story ending with story content, and story ending with rhetorical purpose. The story ending groups did more story development planning than the story starter group, but composition quality was not significantly…

This article provides recommendations for teaching students how to use a story grammar cuing system to improve both the fluency and quality of their stories. The cuing system is a series of steps in the form of a checklist that serves as a self-regulatory mechanism for prompting attention, memory, and accuracy. (JDD)

Third in a series of booklets designed to assist Year 6 teachers with planning instruction to meet objectives of the National Literacy Strategy, this booklet contains Summer Term planning exemplification for three "revision" units (Narrative, Poetry and Non-fiction) prior to the Key Stage 2 tests and one unit after the tests (Extended…

Presents reading/writing units based on story grammar techniques and intended for students in grades one through six. (FL)

This manual is intended for teachers using the Project Success Enrichment (PSE) program to teach language arts to gifted and typical elementary school students. Following an introduction that outlines the purposes and objectives set forth in the Project Success Enrichment: Language Arts Introductory Unit, this component focuses on the short story…

Use of a directed creative writing exercise to assess intermediate language students' skills is discussed. The technique was developed for second-year college Spanish instruction as an alternative to conventional writing tests in which anxiety or lack of motivation may inhibit performance. Differences in the nature of language skills (listening,…