Making connections between children's existing means of expression (play, art, and movement) and the intricacies of print is a necessary and time-honored approach to writing instruction in the early years of school, yet, after kindergarten, one that is easily overlooked. In this article, we examine an approach to writing instruction for…

The act of writing involves decision-making that can be challenging for elementary students as they choose ideas, organization structures, and audiences for whom to share their messages. Teachers can support students in their decision-making through providing explicit explanation of the metacognitive decision-making that occurs at each stage of…

Emergent bilingual children express their ideas in written language through meaningful marks on a page by leveraging their oral language and print focused skills from home and school languages. Because writing is a complex task, particularly for children learning more than one language, teachers must make decisions about how they guide children…

Since the 1960s, a group of educators and researchers have championed the idea that learning coding and learning to read and write are, in some sense, part of the same skill set, but the grounds for asserting that similarity have continually shifted. Some have argued that as texts increasingly integrate digital components, expertise in coding will…

With increasing expectations on students regarding written communication, the promotion of student agency in writing is more important now than ever. Teachers must find ways to engage and empower all learners throughout the writing process so they can produce authentic and meaningful writing independently. To promote such agency, educators must…

As K-5 dual language programs gain popularity in the United States, language teaching, however, often still prioritizes discrete and decontextualized learning that is not built on students' interests and experiences or their multilingual and multimodal resources. This article reports on a classroom-based ethnographic case study and illustrates how…

Writer's checklists are evidence-based procedural facilitators that prompt students to actively engage in the writing process. Students with diverse learning needs experience problems when composing texts because of the complex steps involved. To write effectively, students must focus on understanding prompts; setting goals; generating,…

The authors employ hip-hop music as a literacy heuristic aimed at supporting the literacy development of kindergarten and first-grade students. How do young students learn to write hip-hop lyrics? How do young students engage in hip-hop reading and writing processes? The classroom examples show that students engaged in individual and interactive…

Interactive writing is a process-oriented instructional approach designed to make the composing and encoding processes of writing overt and explicit for young students who are learning to write. It is particularly suitable for students who struggle with literacy learning. This article describes one first-grade teacher's use of interactive writing…

Proficient writers spend substantial time planning for writing, and that planning begins with analyzing the writing task. They spend time considering the topic, the audience and its needs, and the genre and form of the writing. This rhetorical analysis helps them set goals, orient their attention, and get organized. Task analysis can also help…

Students need inspiration to write. Assigning is not teaching. In order to inspire students to write fiction worth reading, teachers must take them through the process of writing. Physical objects inspire good writing with depth. In this article, the reader will be taken through the process of inspiring young writers through the use of boxes.…

Six-word memoirs are readily available through books, magazine articles, and on the Internet. This teaching tip explores how to use six-word memoirs to guide students through the writing process steps from developing and revising a concise memoir, to employing technology and imagery, to publishing final versions of their work online. Included in…

Research shows that cognitively demanding text-based writing assignments increase students' reading comprehension skills and analytic writing competencies. In this article, we describe the steps that upper-elementary grade teachers can take to develop cognitively demanding assignments that build these higher-level literacy skills and put students…

The purpose of this article is to explore ways in which blogs can support literacy communities while developing a writing community. Examples of how a classroom teacher uses blogs to strengthen the writing process is described. (Contains 2 figures and 1 table.)

Teachers often find it difficult to integrate writing and mathematics while honoring the integrity of both disciplines. In this article, the authors present two levels of integration that teachers may use as a starting point. The first level, writing without revision, can be worked into mathematics instruction quickly and readily. The second…