Provides a chart delineating some of the benchmarks in the writing development of elementary school children. Offers a variety of suitable program strategies with which teachers can modify their writing programs to suit the developmental stages of their students. (HTH)

Recounts an incident illustrating a child's development of communication skills and offers suggestions for parents to help facilitate that development. (HTH)

Writing readiness is based on linguistic readiness, conceptual readiness, and a knowledge of the composition process. (DD)

Discusses two approaches to teaching poetry writing to children: a method approach that molds children's creativity into acceptable forms, and an experimental approach that allows children to try out personal feelings and different forms, which is more conducive to their perceptions, creativity, and developing sense of self. (HTH)

Offers a five-step support technique for transferring speaking to writing and offers observations on helping children with the conventions of writing. (HTH)

Discusses efforts at teaching children in kindergarten how to write, indicating that emergent readers can indeed write with scribbles, random letters, numerals, and sometimes words. Discusses their dictation, journal content, writing stages, and developmental trends. (HTH)

Argues that James Moffett's influential model of a young writer's development is flawed, because it depicts beginning writers as being far more limited than they are. (HTH)

Explores the patterns in children's talk about their writing, by means of transcribed conversations during daily writing/sharing sessions in a first grade classroom. Discusses the importance of this kind of talk. (HTH)

Describes how kindergarten children use invented spelling to rewrite Mother Goose nursery rhymes, indicating the phoneme grapheme system the children perceived from spoken language. (HTH)

Observes that children are ready to write when they understand what writing does, when they are interested in writing, when they want to communicate through writing, and when they understand that written symbols represent meaning. (RL)

Describes a longitudinal study of first-grade students' progress in learning punctuation. Examines the classroom as a writing environment, then presents a picture of the children's progress in learning to use apostrophes, quotation marks, and periods, drawing several implications for teaching. (HTH)

Describes how the writing of a favorite author helped a child accomplish what she wanted in her own writing. Discusses the classroom environment that encouraged the child's writing. (HTH)

Considers register (factors that vary in situational contexts and produce differences in meaning intent and meaning exchange) variance with its accompanying language transactions during written language events involving children and adults. Illustrates register variance with the writing and drawing of a four-year-old and a first-grader. (HTH)

Describes a first grade classroom in which children learn the concept of "author" by writing their own books, which are then shared with the rest of the class. (HTH)

Examines the writing of a four-year-old child in response to literature. Discusses the child's uses for writing and the concepts and principles of early writing. Demonstrates the child's engagement with children's books. (RS)