Emphasizing real-life communication skills, this book offers cooperative activities to help teachers supplement their writing programs with easy-to-use critical thinking activities. The activities in the book are suitable for grades 4 through 8, for gifted younger students, or as a remediation tool for older students. The activities in the book are intended to develop the writing skills of descriptive vocabulary, directionality, comparison and contrast, classification, and organization. Every activity in the book contains four separate illustrations for description and discovery so that each person in a four-student group has the opportunity to act as both reader and writer. The book contains 14 descriptive mystery topics in which students are given a picture of one unique object that can be found on a page of similar objectives. The role of the student is twofold: to write a description of the unique object so that another student can find it on the page; and to accurately, read, interpret, and apply a written description to locate a particular object. The mystery topics are: shoes, mice, tropical islands, flags, mountain hideaway, dinosaur pictures, hairstyles, pigs, ice cream treats, houses, decorated cakes, baseball mitts, rabbits and dogs. The book also includes teacher suggestions, a description of possible areas of comparison with sample descriptions, and five optional lesson plans. (RS)