This book captures the diversity and richness of writing as it relates to different forms of abilities, skills, competencies, and expertise. Psychologists, educators, researchers, and practitioners in neighboring areas are interested in exploring how writing develops and in what manner this development can be fostered, but they lack a handy,…

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'…

This anthology presents the creative writing of students in grades 7-12 discussing "Arizona treasures" and celebrating Arizona Statehood Day in 1994. The 36 poems and short descriptive pieces were chosen from over 1,000 entries from students in schools around Arizona. Entries in the anthology are grouped by grade level--grades 7-8, 9-10,…

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…

Discusses the preperation necessary for children's poetic expression of creativity, the teachers role and the process by which the children can be aided to write poetry. (RB)

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…

Presents two teaching methods that lend structure to the teaching of poetry writing. (MAI)

In this article, the nature of adolescent judgement was investigated by means of two components: the maturation of adolescent mental processes and the interaction of poetry in that maturation. (Author/RK)

Simplification of Haiku to enable fifth graders to write their own verse. (AF)

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)

How to help students progress from descriptive to affective to creative responses through the use of films in a language arts class. (RB)