Describes a poetry writing exercise that used photographs as a stimulus. Presents some poems produced by this exercise. (JL)

Describes an eighth-grade teacher's decision to heed innervoices and make time for poetry in her classroom. The class began by reading fun-filled, picture-book poetry; enlisted the help of school and town librarians in finding compelling single-author works and anthologies; and finally wrote "recipe poems" together. (Contains 27…

Contends that an important theme for children in the middle grades to explore is that of identity, the task of self-definition States that good poetry and fiction can lead such students to do writing that helps them along the "slippery path" to self-definition. Describes several writing exercises that address middle school children. (PA)

Discusses the efforts of a fifth-grade teacher and a visiting poet to rekindle students' sense of poetic passion and pleasure. Describes how the authors introduced students to poems for two voices (using P. Fleischman's "Joyful Noise"). The poetry unit culminated in a project in which students read and performed Fleischman's poems, then wrote and…

A study investigaged: (1) in what ways sixth-grade students appropriated language and/or themes from multicultural poetry into their own poetry writing and (2) when students appropriated language and/or themes, what factors influenced their choices. Subjects were 5 students within a class of 22, chosen for case studies because of their unique…

Designed to meet the needs of children of various age and ability levels, this book provides teachers of grades 4-9 with over 250 writing activities and reproducible worksheets for teaching students how to write effective compositions, essays, stories, poems, and more. Activities in the book focus on the various stages of the writing process,…

Sixth grade students can use cinquain poems to explore language, learn grammar, and write creatively. Before learning about cinquains, students should be introduced to simpler poetic forms. To introduce cinquains, the teacher writes a simple example on the board and has the students informally figure out the parts of speech and grammatical…

Developmental writing activities (186), based on the theory that the process of writing can be arranged in a hierarchical chain of learning experiences, are divided among six chapters: "The Ebb and Flow of Writing,""Composition Writing as an Artistic Expression,""Spelling Problems and the Flow of Expression,""Traditional and Experimental Verse…