Creativity, a means of communicating a personal and unique response to life, should be nurtured and cultivated in the classroom. This document discusses the nature of creativity and, using the analogy of a gardener cultivating a garden, outlines nine steps a teacher may take in developing students' creativity--prepare the soil, plant the garden…

One approach to introducing students to poetry is to have them write and analyze their own poems. Although this approach has some disadvantages, it does serve to tap students' experiences and expressive potential with creative projects and to give them an immediate and direct relationship with the traditional published works. By writing poems…

Dreams can be used to draw students into an authentic expression of their creativity and to give them some validation for what they are as persons. A "dream seminar" in a writing course could have students read and discuss Whitman's "Leaves of Grass"; log, report, and discuss their dreams during the course; and explore other…

The theme of this issue of the "Connecticut English Journal" is poetry instruction. Numerous ideas, examples, programs, and resources are offered to help students and teachers learn to read, analyze, write, and enjoy poems. The 28 articles and poems provide interpretations of what poetry is, ideas for publishing student writing, strategies for…

A theory of teaching creative writing that involves preconscious learning is presented in this paper. Following a review of the literature on methods of developing writing ability, the paper describes a three-step creative process of preparation (the gathering and study of appropriate materials), incubation (the preconscious absorption and shaping…

Students can be taught to create vivid, colorful descriptions. To train their senses and sharpen their word choices and images, they can be asked to (1) list specific adjectives to describe such an image-producing word as "ocean," (2) substitute sharply-etched verbs for general ones in a given sentence, (3) record day-to-day observations in a…

An interest in poetry provides motivation for children to read; in order to inspire such an interest, teachers must avoid four commonly used approaches to poetry: teaching poetry as an isolated subject, as if it had a language all its own; teaching poetry for purposes of analysis; selecting inappropriate poetry for children and presenting it in…

This paper argues that instead of getting "back to basics" (correct usage, spelling, capitalization, etc.) teachers of writing should be concerned with the fundamentals of writing well. These include an attention to the composing process; experience with producing a variety of writings (spontaneous writing, the persuasive essay, the critical…

The essays included in this periodical focus on teaching elementary school children how to appreciate and how to write poetry. "Children, Poetry, and Memorization," by J.F.S. Smeall, outlines the historical basis, and perceptual limitations, of the use of print media alone in classroom instruction. Suggestions for encouraging children's recitation…

This investigation is concerned with teachers' attitudes toward activities students engage in before writing, the purpose of students' writing, and their motivation for writing. The findings of the study indicate that classroom discussion seems to be teacher-centered, with very little action taking place among the students; most of the teachers…

Teachers can encourage youngsters to express their ideas creatively by providing help in three areas--content, language, and process. In terms of content, children often have few resources for tapping their thoughts, and may need 'pump primers' such as being told the beginning and end of a story and speculating about a variety of middles. Once…

This study investigated two major hypotheses: (1) If capable high school seniors are oriented to the reading of a short story by a pre-assigned, creative writing task, their attitudes toward the story will be more positive than if they are oriented to it by a pre-assigned, noncreative writing task and (2) if those students respond to the creative…

Sentence analysis by the Reed and Kellogg technique of diagraming can present the exact function of every clause in the sentence, of every phrase in the clause, and of every word in the phrase. Furthermore, it can teach the pupil to look through the literary order and discover the logical order, and it is from the teacher that the student learns…

The purpose of this study was to devise and test an approach to teaching composition that emphasized discovery, structure, writer's voice, and revision. The assumptions were that to write effectively the student must have a significant idea, that the idea must exist in some specific form, and that the human voice of the writer must come through…