Describes how one English teacher engaged in a collaborative writing exercise with a fifth-grade female student. Explains how the teacher worked to become an equal partner with the student in the collaborative effort. Provides specific information about how the student's writing improved. (HB)

Explores an inner-city girl's view on school-based literacy activities in relation to several factors in the literature that are important to children's attitudes toward reading and writing. Identifies several factors including: intrinsic satisfaction she gains from the activities, her beliefs about the importance of schooling, and her…

Examined how the social context of working within same- or different-sex peer dyads related to gender-typed ideas expressed in creative stories. Sixth graders collaborated to write creative stories. Boy dyads' stories included more overtly aggressive ideas and fewer prosocial story ideas than girl dyads' stories. Mixed-gender dyads' stories…

Shares the story of how dance and writing brought together a group of elderly and high-school-age women, through a 12-week program that used dance and writing to draw from personal stories and to inspire personal expression. (SR)

Describes one teacher's approach to process writing, a mainstay for Montessori adolescent classrooms. The premise of the method is that everyone has the natural potential to write and that the emergence of the inner voice must be nurtured by extended conferencing and revision combined with taking risks, experimenting, and continually revising.…

Student teaching in New York City on September 11, 2001, forced the author to scrap her carefully planned lessons. Instead, she designed a unit to address the urgent needs of the ninth graders in her care. In this article, the author describes the poetry unit she designed to help students deal with the grieving process and allow them a way to talk…

In this essay, the author argues for a democratized way of developing a consciousness of differences by describing two abbreviated creative writing classroom experiences with urban sixth grade middle school students during the 2002-2003 academic year. She draws on Tony Medina's (2001) claim that poetry and writing weave people and worlds together…

Teaching for creativity in writing requires not only knowledge, skills and understanding, but the emotional capacity to tolerate uncertainty, take risks and engage artistically. This paper reflects upon one strand of a research project which is examining the relationship between teachers' development as writers at their own level and their…

Children's writings seem to elicit a somewhat narrow range of adult responses. More often than not, the adult tendency is to read children's fictional writings as autobiographical. The adult critic can, that is, think of the child author as a collection of biographical facts, a series of life experiences with an end point marked by the production…

In recent years, haiku has become a widely adopted part of the language arts curriculum, particularly at the elementary level. Educators appreciate the simplicity and brevity of haiku as a poetic form that young students can grasp fairly easily and therefore express themselves readily. However, this focus on form has often been to the exclusion of…

Demonstrating to teachers how to experience the joys of the craft along with their students, this book examines portfolios, record keeping, and methods for teaching conventions, spelling, and literary genres including fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. Each chapter includes a varying number of "Actions," glossed objectives providing new…

Often students have the option to choose topics to write about during creative writing sessions. Increasingly, however, state mandated tests do not give students options of writing topics. The state mandated test specifies the topic. "Three B's and a C" is an integrated creative writing/social studies program that teaches students…

This paper presents a case study of a young writer, a girl aged between 9 and 10 over the 6-month period analyzed. The writer accessed KidPub, a World Wide Web site that accepts stories submitted by or on behalf of children and young people under the age of 16 and publishes them, giving each story its own Web page. With the help of a mentor, the…

This book provides a theoretical underpinning for the strategy of freewriting through a collection of 16 essays that are very diverse in focus, methodology, and point of view. The essays are as follows: "Recording and Transforming: The Mystery of the Ten-Minute Freewrite" (Sheryl I. Fontaine); "Freewriting: An Aid to Rereading…

These two volumes contain writings designed for the new reader who is in prison. Written by both inmates and external volunteers, the material in these volumes includes poems, stories, and short essays that deal with subjects of interest to prison inmates. To help the new reader, easier-to-read pieces are presented first. Titles in volume I are as…