Discusses ways teachers can help their students write worthwhile poems by preparing the children, providing them with suitable occasions for writing, and giving them opportunities to refine their poems. (DD)

Describes one experience in providing a relevant and thought provoking evening of entertainment for the community through the development of the local documentary" technique. (Author)

Describes the Teachers and Writers Collaborative, a program in which a professional writer works closely on a long-term basis with a particular group of public school students and their teacher. Object: to encourage children to write creatively, out of their own experiences, about what is real to them. (MG)

Explains how having students write "found poems" by using the card catalog helps introduce the card catalog to students while also serving as an introduction to poetry. (JL)

Four professors of children's literature offer suggestions based on extensive experience for teaching critical attitudes and insights in the elementary school grades. (HOD)

Offers ideas as starting points intended to help make poems more accessible to children. Suggests ideas for first encounters, sharing and presenting poems, becoming familiar with a poem, exploring a poem to increase comprehension, asking questions, collecting poems, and demystifying poetry. (HOD)

Describes a set of tools (called Story Maker, Pre-Fab Story Maker, and Story Maker Maker) for teaching creative writing that takes advantage of the potential power of the social situation in the classroom, focuses on higher-level structures in text, and integrates reading and writing in school. (AEA)

Discusses well-written, moving children's stories that can be used to promote children's writing. (RL)

Reports on a "summing up" assignment at the end of a course on the fiction of J. D. Salinger. Notes the way students used parodies to display their knowledge of Salinger's style and recurrent themes. Offers one student-written parody as an example. (RL)

Discusses the procedures that the author uses to allow all her students to move easily and gradually from a fragmented description of a scene to a completed short story. (RL)

Suggests ways to bring nursery rhymes into the elementary school classroom through creative dramatics, creative writing, and reading experiences. (DD)