This article presents a case study of a fourth-grade teacher, Kathy Topaz (all names are pseudonyms), her seventeen students, and the ways that they talked about and rehearsed essay-writing through speech across the school year in an inclusive fourth grade class. With increased focus on informational writing and opinion writing in curriculum and Common Core State Standards (CCSS) across grade levels, Kathy, like most upper elementary teachers, needed to teach her students the five-paragraph essay structure in a grade-appropriate format for upper elementary students. Starting in September of the year of the study, Kathy intentionally facilitated talking prompts and sentence stems, as well as dramatic and playful activities, as ways to rehearse the structure and content for writing in various genres such as personal narrative, poetry, and -- the focus of this article -- expository, or essay-writing. In the present study, Kathy's goal for the students was to explore and practice key concepts of the expository genre and its structure through speech, as rehearsal, before committing their own ideas to paper during independent writing time in Writing Workshop.