Presents suggestions for bringing reading and writing to life in the classroom and helping students develop a lifelong love of both. Includes creating a refrigerator door for displaying student work, using digital notebooks, establishing a publishing center, holding lunch-bunch meetings, binding students' writing into class collections, reading…

Argues that the challenge for writing centers to continue to be viable lies not so much in responding to changing educational demands as to continuing to meet the ongoing demand for competent writing in the academy. (NH)

Describes how the author, in his second semester freshman composition class devoted to teaching research skills, teaches students the subtleties of what to paraphrase and what to quote directly. (SR)

Describes a "build-the-box" lesson to develop a better understanding of writing useful and effective instructions. Considers how the lack of instruction with this assignment compels students to think creatively to complete the project. Concludes that many students realize the difficulty in creating easy-to-understand instructions. Enhances the…

Examined the development of students' handwriting speed and legibility. Diverse students in grades one through nine completed three writing tasks (copying, writing a narrative, and writing an essay). Researchers measured their speed and legibility. Results indicated that handwriting speed and legibility did not follow a parallel course of…

Determines the pattern of errors in Spanish spelling. Analyzes and proposes a classification system for the errors made by children in the initial stages of the acquisition of spelling skills. Finds the diverse forms of only 20 Spanish words produces 36% of the spelling errors in Spanish; and substitution is the most frequent type of error. (RS)

Presents an activity, appropriate for children in grades five through nine, that requires students to reconstruct a Lego structure after reading other students' written description of the construction process. Highlights the connection between explicit writing and scientific observation and involves students in observing, classifying, measuring,…

Describes an assignment in which students sharpen their punctuation skills by arranging poems without punctuation in a prose form with appropriate punctuation. Suggests using the poetry of a fictional character from Don Marqui's "archy and mehitabel." (TB)

Organizes instructional strategies into two sets: the first focusing on teaching editing skills, and the second on teaching writing conventions unconventionally. Considers teaching writing conventions using a social constructivist approach. Presents instructional approaches that provide a framework for helping students to express their ideas…

Examines the importance of the notion of community in a remedial writing class at an urban university. Though labeled a "community of writers," the group did not write, and students were considered failed writers. Their story illustrates the high value placed on the notion of community in school, its vulnerable nature, and the…

Students can learn to appreciate history as readers and writers of historical fiction. This section presents an introduction to historical fiction, a display idea, a mystery history game, discussion of character-building, charts for students to fill in with information on historical characters, suggestions for customizing writing centers and for…

Provides the example of writing as a subject in which an educator might design instruction so that students think their way through the logic of the subject rather than memorize bits and pieces of someone else's thought (never grasping its logic). Presents four instructional steps: prethinking the course, student orientation, initial practice, and…

Describes a question writing contest in which students were asked to write and submit multiple choice questions of the assertion-reason type (type E) in physiology. (Author/CCM)

The aim of the study was to investigate prospective relationships between reading and writing performance during the first grade of primary school. The data was collected from 83 Finnish-speaking children who were examined four times on reading, spelling, and productive writing skills during the first grade. At the beginning of the school year,…

Cauley's books about snakes demonstrate intentional and interesting decisions by a beginning writer. The conclusion states that learning to choose topics for writing in thoughtful ways is an important part of the curriculum in writing workshop.