Performing text in the form of choral reading, rap, reader's theatre, and/or simulations offers students a powerful vehicle for understanding and recalling key concepts and significant details culled from textual materials. Creating a script, poem, or lyrics to perform requires repeated readings of a text, a practice that increases participants'…

The way that the teacher responds to students' writing and talking is most important when developing poetry skills. This article suggests that poetry can not be taught through well-planned lessons but must come from communication and feeling. (DF)

Discusses how teachers and parents can help children turn everyday experiences into topics to write about, whether in the form of personal journals, autobiographical essays, or poetry. (MDM)

Losing friendships are significant events for people throughout their life span. In spite of the importance of friendships to psychosocial health, studies of friendships loss are not found in the literature. This article begins to address this gap through a qualitative study utilizing autobiographical poetry as data. This study exemplifies…

The winning entries in this bulletin were chosen by the Illinois Association of Teachers of English as representing the best prose and poetry in the state for 1977. The 14 winners in the prose diviision were chosen from 357 student entries from 67 schools. The prose covers a variety of writing types including fiction, argumentation, and exposition…

Presents suggestions for teaching students about poetry by using pets. The article recommends discussing poems about pets, writing with rhyme to describe pets, writing free-verse sketches about pets, collaboratively describing pets, and studying line breaks by writing one-line descriptions of imaginary pets. A reproducible teacher page offers two…

Some 60 activities in language arts for use in the out-of-doors are described. Categories for these middle school activities include oral activities, factual writing, fictional writing, and poetry. (JC)

Presents two children's poems about candy, by Dorothy Aldis. The article describes a teaching unit on the poems, the poet, and her use of end rhymes. Activities include writing rhyming words, writing rhyming poems, rhyming a recipe, and creating collages. (SM)

Discusses using comics in high school and college writing and English classes to teach figurative language and other literary terms and techniques such as style and descriptive writing. Describes several activities and notes benefits of using comics in this way. (SR)

Describes five activities for college writing courses: (1) sports as a literary topic; (2) paragraph descriptions of a favorite meal; (3) interdisciplinary team teaching in the humanities; (4) use of "real" letters and memoranda in a technical writing course; and (5) a word-strength chart for a poetry-writing class. (MM)

Three studies assessed the relationship between expressive writing (poetry writing and journal keeping) and ego identity development among high school and college students. Poetry writers were more likely to be in the identity achiever status. No differences were found between students keeping personal journals and those who had not. (Author/GDC)