This handbook is intended to provide teachers with background information about the writing skills needed by General Educational Development (GED) students as well as practical instructional activities for use in the adult basic education/GED classroom. A guide to using the ideabook explains the POWER format that involves Prewriting, Organizing, Writing, Editing, and Rewriting. It lists general objectives and discusses use of the 10 writing tasks that move the students developmentally from the concrete to the abstract. Each task is composed of these components: a list of key objectives; a prompt that contains background information, directions, and key words; thought questions (Prewriting); student activities; directions for the Organizing, Writing, Editing, and Rereading stages that the teacher may use verbatim; and an additional prompt, which can be used at the teacher's discretion as extra classroom practice. Two reproducible student forms for each activity are included in the appendix. One consists solely of a prompt; an expanded version provides all the material found on the teacher sheets. These reproducible sheets are also appended: a student record sheet, a summary sheet of the five steps in the POWER model, and instructor and student copies of a Bertrand Russell essay. (YLB)