Explores activities described in ERIC documents that are designed to create in the student an awareness of audience beyond the classroom setting. (HTH)

Uses poetry and poetic prose to remind readers of the power of poetic language. Discusses the author's experience as a poet and her work with teachers to bring poetry into children's lives. (SR)

Contends that by using nonfiction writing as a daily developmental process, a child finds a predictable, nurturing, and accepting environment which helps teachers understand their students, helps children learn, and promotes acceptance of both the student and the child. (MS)

Presents excerpts of letters written by children to their favorite children's authors, discussing how the letter writing experience parallels authors' experiences. Also presents responses from some of the authors. (HTH)

Discusses the development of voice through a specific free-form poetry-writing experience. Suggests a method for teaching poetry that draws heavily on poets from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Shares evidence that this approach to teaching poetry can be the starting point for students developing writers' voice, and suggests ways to move…

Discusses the differences between inauthentic and authentic writing, arguing that most writing in school is inauthentic, because it is written for someone else's intentions. Examples are cited from a classroom with an essentially whole language orientation, but which occasionally reverts to inauthentic writing assignments. (HTH)

Describes a "directed writing activity" that teachers can use in developing writing sessions that consistently produce good results. Outlines six steps in the writing activity: prewriting, framing the writing assignment, writing the assignment, revising the draft, editing, and writing the final draft. (AEA)

Proposes that an awareness of writing as a process is the necessary basis for building effective writing programs, provides examples of activities that promote more creative writing samples, and expresses the need for emphasis on different purposes and audiences for writing assignments to broaden young writers' styles. (HTH)

Describes a way to teach children the research paper through personal discovery without constraints that usually compel them to copy from reference books. The process demonstrates that organizational schemes for children are intuitive, and that teachers can show children how to use peer response groups during their writing to aid in…

Recounts a teacher's involvement with students in the spontaneous process of learning to write. Presents the benefits of such an approach as preferable to conventional structured methods of writing instruction. (HTH)

Describes a writing workshop in which teachers work with clay and write about their products. (HTH)

Examines a number of language activities in educational software, noting that most focus on surface structure and conventions, thus closing off students' options rather than expanding them. Discusses how, by improvising with word processors, teachers can tailor activities to help students explore and reflect on their reading and writing…

Argues that the best way to encourage writers is to allow that their writing has a real purpose and a real audience. Discusses how unself-conscious response to the purpose of writing is more useful than responses that attend only to technique and form. (SRT)

Looks into the functions of children's writing to determine what children can meaningfully write about. Discusses research on the functions of writing and then suggests assignments where children write letters to different audiences, such as to themselves and to their future children. These assignments help children learn about themselves. (SKC)

Highlights 14 ERIC documents dating from 1987 to 1989 that are resources for using computers in the language arts classroom. Presents annotations for each document. (MG)