Describes a six-week poetry writing workshop for an eighth-grade class. Discusses getting started, two weeks of immersion in reading poetry, students writing their own poetry, creating a community of poets in the classroom, evaluation, students' poetry, and what the teacher learned. Notes that students gained a much richer understanding of poetry.…

Describes a project that introduced eighth graders to a wide range of classics (including Aesop, Confucius, Ovid, and Jean de La Fontaine). Shows how the author used these works to inspire the kids to write their own poems and stories. (SR)

Describes an exploration the author and his seventh-grade students undertook as they wrote essays about objects of personal significance. Describes how they examined a piece of literature (an essay) as a model for their own writing, how they spent some time talking and listening to one another about their personal objects, and how they then wrote…

Bringing together an enthusiasm for biography and a belief in in-depth learning through long-term projects which include manipulating the material to be learned, this book presents a reading-and-writing approach to biography for elementary and middle school students in which students research and write biographies. Following a foreword and an…

Discusses how pretending to be a character or to help a character with a problem made reading and writing meaningful for middle school students. Describes activities that promoted writing about thinking, thinking as a character would, character integration, creating character journals, and relating to characters. (SR)