Standards can aid educators as they work to produce strong student writers who can create meaningful and skillfully crafted authentic pieces of writing. This once-a-month, yearlong professional development program, conducted during the school day, shifted a district's kindergarten writing program to a writing workshop model that enabled the…

Looks at the importance of valuing children's play for its contributions to writing skills. Shares the insights a teacher derives from observing children in situations where they seem to be "only playing." Reminds readers of the crucial connection between assessment and teaching that should be maintained. (MG)

Describes working with multiage elementary school students on demand writing--writing to meet deadlines. Discusses why to teach it, practical applications, what teachers need to know before beginning instruction, getting started, introducing demand writing, modeling it, teaching beginnings and endings, and revising and editing/proofreading. (SR)

Describes a writing course developed at Rutgers University (New Jersey) for increasing enrollment of elementary school teachers. Participants spend the bulk of their time in each course writing, discussing the writing in small groups and the processes and problems of the writing. (HTH)

Describes how, when a working writer visited a sixth-grade classroom on an ongoing basis to interact with students, the language and activities of the writing community changed in interesting and positive ways. (SR)

Discusses student responses to and interactions with a professional children's writer who visited a fifth grade writing workshop. Describes the emerging confidence as writers of the children and the classroom teacher as a result of the author's visits. (HTH)

Describes fourth-grade students' experiences during a concentrated research writing project. Shows through a case study how students learned to present objective information through a narrative vehicle. (HTH)

Discusses materials in the ERIC system dealing with inservice session on writing as a process, improving teacher writing skills, conducting classroom research, and improving teaching attitudes. (HTH)

Discusses the author's experiences while attending a writing workshop--and how they reshaped the way in which he taught writing in a subsequent workshop developed in his own district--which encompassed writing through reading, writing environments, focus, writing from personal experience, and listening to students while they learn to write. (HTH)

Describes the growing autonomy of three young siblings as they wrote in the poetic function over a five-year period. Includes samples of the children's poetry. (HTH)

Describes the positive effects of peer interaction during the writing process. Illustrates by describing integration of this method in a seventh-grade classroom and how it improved the students' writing quality and attitudes. (HTH)

Describes the setbacks and remarkable progress in one student's writing and attitudes as the result of focusing on the writing process in a one-to-one tutorial relationship. (HTH)

Examines the early writing of a young child over the course of several months to illustrate the struggle with the writing process. Draws parallels between the child's writing progress and that of the author as she learned to be comfortable as a writer and suggests implications for the teaching of writing. (HTH)

Observes that changes in the pattern of social interactions in classrooms as a result of computers may be even more significant than any simple technological effect. Illustrates the point with an example of sixth-grade writing on the QUILL software system, and the student's increased peer interaction and audience awareness. (HTH)

Describes how the author participated in her son Carl's writing process at home when she realized his growing resistance to writing in school in the second grade. Examines the in-class composing process and Carl's frustrations. Describes how she became Carl's scribe at home as he gradually discovered that writing could be a symbolic representation…