A fifth grader wanted to know what he had to do to get all his ideas the way he wanted them in his story writing "and" have the spelling, punctuation and quotation marks correctly styled. His teacher encouraged him to think about writing as a process and provided the student with three steps as guidelines for effective writing. (Author/RK)

The author explains her practice of requiring each of her students to write her a weekly letter, which she answers. These private correspondences help her to understand the individuals in her class and give the students practice in letter writing. (SJL)

Finger-snapping, toe-tapping music is a prelude to penmanship practice. (Editor)

The author explains how she taught third- and fourth-graders the skills needed to produce a class newspaper: note-taking, layout, news writing, and proofreading. She found that learning research skills and disciplined newswriting improved students' writing in general. (SJL)

"Scratch,""Scribe," and "Scribble" are three strategies for teaching writing at any grade level. They are short, ongoing activities that do not require grading. "Scratch" concerns spelling, "Scribe" dictation, and "Scribble" the writing process. (SJL)

Continuing with his suggestion from previous issues that themes of interest to most children can tie together reading, writing and language arts, the author presents classroom activities and reading suggestions based on four more themes: fairness and unfairness; cultural identity; overcoming weaknesses or handicaps; requited and unrequited love.…

Day-by-day lesson ideas are given for an eight-day writing unit in which students study literary conventions and write their own short stories. Evaluation of the stories is continuous throughout the unit and partly done by other students. (SJL)