The authors offer a comprehensive, innovative, and practical approach to teaching writing, focusing on engagement and interaction so students grapple with words and experiences to make meaning. Recent research supports its content and strategies while cognitive development and neurological theories, early literacy, inquiry, and writing as a mode…

While formal, standardized assessment instruments provide valuable and necessary information about students' various abilities and skills, the use of informal and qualitative assessment approaches has the benefit of leading directly to instruction based squarely on an individual student's needs, strengths, and existing skills. This article…

A testament to the belief that K-12 teachers should be writers, this book invites readers into the classrooms and minds of teachers who write. The fiction, poetry, personal essays, and two teacher interviews celebrate the power of writing and invite teachers to become more seriously involved in writing for themselves. The classrooms described in…

This article presents a writing process wheel that has been designed as a task-specific tool for assisting teachers of students with learning disabilities to develop writing competence. The wheel displays five writing stages (prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and publication) in a circular fashion with appropriate activities for each stage.…

Covering book publishing, magazines, educational journals, and other educational markets, this book offers practical, step-by-step methods for taking a teaching idea from the classroom to the printed page. The main focus of the book is on infant/preschool through the sixth grade; however, the major topics are also relevant to those writing at the…

This book describes "Writing Pictures," a daily developmental writing exercise in which students visualize a moment in their life of their own choosing, sketch it quickly, and write four guided sentences in paragraph format about it. Beginning with level one, it takes students through the basic format, and, with time, students progress upward…

This article suggests one way of categorizing types of factual writing and introduces a teaching strategy for developing students' awareness of structural and language features of many factual genres. It is based on genre theory and the idea that generic structures of texts are determined by the purpose of the text. Six nonfiction genres are…

The first of two volumes, this book is primarily concerned with the teaching of creative writing at any grade level, although some ideas may not be applicable in teaching very young students. Although concentrating on the writing of free verse poetry and short "expressive" prose, much of the material presented can be applied to any…

Teaching appropriate composition strategies and self-management routines to inefficient learners can improve their writing. The composition-strategy training intervention program requires (1) task and learner analysis; (2) selection, introduction, acquisition, and evaluation of selected preskills, composition strategies, and metacognitive…

Intended primarily for Kentucky classroom teachers and administrators, this idea book first identifies three major issues that members of the Writing Advisory Committee felt should be addressed so that writing instruction will not suffer because of use of the writing portfolio. The broad issues emphasized in the idea book are for teachers to: (1)…

This article describes a process-oriented writing program for use with learning-disabled students at all grade levels. Strategies for helping students at the planning stage, the drafting stage, and the evaluation and revision stage are offered. (DB)

Writing programs for students with deafness should include teacher-demonstration ("writing aloud"), shared writing, and independent and guided writing done by students. Activities at each developmental level should focus on emerging writers--getting acquainted with print; beginning writers--using written language; developing writers--learning the…

Written by teachers for teachers, this book, the first publication of the Oklahoma Writing Project, contains a collection of articles which describe successful strategies and activities for teaching composition. The articles, which deal with a variety of topics, listed with their authors, are as follows: (1) The Writing Process (Gail E. Tompkins…

This book is a guide to writing measurable goals and objectives for individualized education programs (IEPs) for students with disabilities as required by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). Part 1 discusses appropriate goals, objectives, and benchmarks (GO/Bs). Accompanied by many examples, the text discusses measurability,…

Reading and writing are interrelated. What has been read provides material for writing. This paper focuses on reading endeavors that provide subject matter for writing. The paper first recommends reading poetry to the class and states that the teacher should have ready for use an anthology of children's literature. Children can write poems for…