Offers five steps to prompt students' engagement with a short story and their enhanced understanding as well as enjoyment of writing. Lists short stories useful for this activity. (SR)

Illustrates the literature-writing connection by describing: (1) first-graders' responses to a mini-lesson on leads based on familiar literature; (2) improvement in students' poetry-writing after exposure to books and poems about whales; and (3) a workshop introducing similes through reading and writing poetry. (MM)

Describes a number of ways that a third-grade teacher uses titles to involve students in story meanings. (SR)

Describes class activities for the primary grades based on Margaret W. Brown's book "The Important Book" which connects reading and writing. (SR)

This book discusses semantic feature analysis, a strategy that helps teachers focus students' attention on vocabulary and increase their sensitivity to language. The first half of the book deals with the theoretical foundation, reviews the research, and describes the basic teaching strategy of semantic feature analysis. The book's second half is…

Presents a story-writing activity to encourage the relationship between children's experiences with literature and their ability to write. Emphasizes the importance of having students work in cooperative groups. (MG)

Discusses instructional activities designed to foster the reading-writing connection in the content area classroom. Describes the use of "possible sentences," learning logs, freewriting, dialogue journals, the RAFT technique (role, audience, format, and topic), and the "opinion-proof" organization strategy. (RS)

Provides numerous ideas for helping students write about special memories in the following categories: growing up--future dreams; authors and illustrators; family history; special places; and special memories. Describes how to write a "bio poem," and includes a bibliography of children's books that enhance and enrich student learning and…

Focuses on ways in which students' writing is enhanced when literature becomes an integral part of the elementary classroom. (SR)

Offers an approach for integrating reading and writing through literature study. Discusses preparing the classroom environment, prereading activities, sustained silent reading, minilessons for related skills, enrichment, and a follow-up activity. (PRA)

Describes a second-grade class project in which students wrote a fictional biography in response to several books read aloud to them. Enumerates the 9 steps in the process, and presents selections (chapters 1 and 10) from the book "The Man in the Walnut Shell." (SR)

Offers four practical ideas for classroom use within the field of literacy education: (1) "Press Conference: A Strategy for Integrating Reading with Writing"; (2) "Expressing Ethnic Identity through Brown-Bag Big Books"; (3) "Beanstalk Heroes: Jack and Jim in an Integrated Primary Curriculum"; and (4) "Reading the World around Us." (PRA)

This paper presents four introductory activities designed to help students with their reading problems, motivate them to read, and help them turn their interpretations of literature into effective compositions. The paper presents samples for each of the four activities ("Opinionnaires," Scenarios, Simulations, and Role Playing),…

Notes that when assigned writing topics requiring sophisticated reading students circumvent interpretation by rewriting the text in their personal idiom. Suggests that since meaning is discovered through process, students should be given numerous opportunities to respond to the same text. Offers several kinds of response activities. (JG)

A literate classroom environment immerses a student in a rich, stimulating, interactive, and purposeful print and language environment which is designed to provide for success in reading, writing, listening, and speaking and the needs of individuals responsible for their own learning in a natural, non-competitive, non-threatening, risk-taking…