Describes the author's experience teaching poetry to a fourth-grade class, and how an inspired moment from one student (improvising a poem about an imagined hairstyle of poet Federico Garcia Lorca) led the entire class on a journey of inspiration. Looks at the route to that place of "inspired rightness." (SR)

Describes three fifth-grade students in the author's school who used humor in their writing assignments. Offers samples of their work and their observations about it. (SR)

Considers different fifth-grade students' transformations through expressing themselves with poetry. Claims the content of children's writing suggests a complete revision of standard educational ideas about who the children are, what they know, how they think, and how much they can learn if teachers only know how to tap into their brilliance. (SC)

Discusses techniques and lessons used to assist students in reading with a writer's eye, observing the world with a writer's eye, and developing the craft of writing, including the writer's notebook; grabber leads; show, not tell; unforgettable language; and voice. Notes that developing a community of writers is essential to the successful use of…

Describes a four-week poetry workshop for fifth and sixth graders that tied into the school's focus of study of ancient Egypt and Greece. Describes how the author read poems by Keats and Shelley to the students as they drew pictures while listening, and then wrote poems in response to their own art work. Includes 12 poems written by students. (SR)

Describes teaching history to fourth graders using novels and reference books. Notes that students also publish a newspaper and complete an oral history project. (SR)

Describes how students in a sixth-grade class connected reading and writing in the context of a project on traditional stories and new transformations of those old tales. Includes a 20-item annotated bibliography of transformations of traditional stories. (SR)

Argues that children are as deep as the ocean, with secret places inside of them waiting to be opened. Notes that it is powerful for students to learn they can make sense of the world through words, and describes inviting them into poetry as they read poetry, create poetry packets, and write and revise poems. (SR)

Presents a case study of poetry writing in a fifth grade classroom. Shows not only how writing and reading come together but also how children come together with each other and with published poets. (RS)

Describes a study of tolerance (in a fifth-grade bilingual classroom) organized around literature about the Holocaust. Identifies specific classroom practices that enabled students to interact with texts and to construct and revise meanings of tolerance. Traces steps taken by one student, Matthew, as he moved from limited responses to a proactive…

Pupils in the middle school can be motivated to enjoy and write haiku poetry. A student teacher taught two lessons to a sixth grade class in haiku writing. First, the student teacher read three haikus aloud to students. After discovering the characteristics of a haiku from two models, the class as a whole wrote a haiku based on slides from their…

Discusses "Private Eye," an approach to teaching which focuses on developing students as artists, writers, and scientists. Describes how this approach uses the jewelers loupe to examine everyday objects 5 or 10 times bigger, thus altering students' way of viewing the world through the change of scale and through analogy-provoking questions. (SR)

Describes how teachers (of grades 4-12) can use computers to teach writing at a variety of levels, from the one-computer classroom to the most sophisticated, networked environments. Describes approaches for four electronic environments, how they might best be used, and what types of computer facility are needed. (SR)

A fourth-grade teacher developed a unit on writing designed to help his students go from oral to written text after finding that only 4 of the 22 in his classroom had the organizational and writing skills to get their ideas on paper. The basis of the unit was a unique problem which the teacher himself was trying to solve in real life; namely, how…

Middle school pupils tend to enjoy writing verse containing a selected number of syllables per line. A student teacher taught a unit on poetry writing which included a section on writing tanka verse--a 5-line form with five, seven, five, seven, and seven syllables per line. After discovering the characteristics of a tanka from a model, the class…