Suggestions are offered of ways to encourage the development of writing skills through the supportive sharing and provision of feedback. Suggestions are included for classroom writers' circles, writers' conferences, and editing/revising strategies. (DB)

Explains how a hermit crab, the classroom pet for a class of learning disabled elementary level students, stimulated various writing-related activities, including categorizing, information gathering, and poetry writing. (MM)

Describes "cooperative poetry," a group poetry-writing exercise combining brainstorming, rehearsing, choral reading, assisted reading, memorization, sequencing, and vocabulary development, as well as providing an opportunity for group cooperation. (MM)

Describes a poetry-writing formula that guarantees successful results for writing poems at the elementary level. (MM)

Presents two children's poems about candy, by Dorothy Aldis. The article describes a teaching unit on the poems, the poet, and her use of end rhymes. Activities include writing rhyming words, writing rhyming poems, rhyming a recipe, and creating collages. (SM)

The use of creativity in second-language writing classes is described in which students are asked to pick five unrelated sentences from the textbook and then weave them into a one-page story. Six sample stories are provided. (LB)

Thinking about how published authors get their ideas for stories is one way for children to generate their own story ideas. The article discusses how elementary teachers can use storytelling, reading, examining picture books, and learning writing techniques to help their students select a topic. (SM)

Describes how a teacher integrated an audio cassette version of a Ray Bradbury story into a computer-supported creative writing project in her seventh-grade literature class. (SR)

Contains an imaginary writing assignment and an imaginary student's response to it that critiques it and the conception of writing it appears to be predicated upon. (TB)

In this article, the authors interpret an event of collaborative poetry writing in a pre-service teacher education class in order to demonstrate the ways in which different theories of learning are and are not able to account for the production of original poems. The first part of the paper offers a conceptual heuristic that organizes a variety of…

Stresses the importance of the teacher's role in establishing a bond of trust with emotionally disturbed youngsters when teaching them creative writing. (RB)

Written by teachers and poets, this book offers insights into the nature of poetry and the ways in which children can be taught to enjoy reading and writing poetry. The book contains the following articles: "Poetry and the Magic of Words," by Colin Thiele; "Poetry and the Child," by Charles Causley; "A Verse Along the…

Children respond happily and spontaneously to poetry, their natural language and the simplest form of literature. This paper presents reasons for using poetry with children, discusses the nature of children's poetry and the people who write it, explores the times and the ways in which teachers should use poetry with children in the classroom,…