The Texas Educational Assessment of Minimum Skills (TEAMS) was developed by the Texas Education Agency (TEA), in response to Texas House Bill 72 (1984), which mandated a new basic skills assessment program for mathematics, reading, and writing at grades 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, and 11. This document is one in a series of Instructional Strategies Guides designed to familiarize Texas educators with the types of strategies employed in assessing learner mastery of TEAMS objectives and to provide suggested instructional activities that can be used to promote mastery of those objectives. This manual focuses on the TEAMS objectives for written composition for grades 3, 5, 7, and 9. The purpose of the composition requirement is to give students the opportunity to use the language skills they are taught. Three purposes of written communication (persuasive, informative, and expressive) and three modes or methods of achieving those purposes (narrative, descriptive and classificatory) are identified as appropriate for measurement on the TEAMS tests. The six composition objectives are described. The manual also includes scoring guides with writing samples for informative/descriptive writing, and expressive/narrative writing at the elementary level; and informative/classificatory writing, and persuasive/descriptive writing at the secondary level. Instructional strategies and suggested activities for the written composition objectives for grades 3, 5, 7, and 9 are included. (JAZ)