The greater emphasis on information books in elementary schools has led to an increased emphasis on informational writing as well. Although some have suggested utilizing mentor texts to engage children in informational writing, there has been little information about the developmental progression of children's ability to compose in this genre.…

This article introduces a modification of the sentence completion task that acquaints students with various types of informational text structures (e.g., cause-effect, compare-contrast) and challenges their higher order reading and writing skills. When the individual sentences comprising an expository paragraph are intermingled with unrelated…

Reviews research which indicates that children should be taught to consider their purpose for reading and should receive feedback on whether they have achieved their purpose. (MKM)

Presents comments from five contributors concerning ways to improve parent workshops, the children's literature requirements for teacher certification, paragraph construction, note writing as a way to improve writing skills, and an in-depth study of the works of Maurice Sendak. (FL)

Describes several types of "paragraph frames" to help teach beginning writing in the content areas. Notes that these frames, employing a modified cloze procedure, help bridge the gap between narrative and expository reading and writing. Provides several student writing samples. (MM)

Offers a four-step procedure that can be used to help upper elementary school students learn to write a well-structured expository paragraph. Suggests that the writing experience is a bridge to understanding more difficult text structure. (FL)