Suggests that children must be allowed their voices through writing. Discusses how four eighth-grade students turned life experiences into meaningful writing for the classroom. (RS)

Describes using music with eighth-grade students for generating story ideas to write about. (SR)

Offers researchers' perspectives for online publication. Shows how to establish criteria for validating these sites as valuable resources in student-centered teaching and learning. Gives reasons why middle school writers should publish on the web. Presents a chart of 18 websites with a description and a list of key factors regarding the websites.…

Describes a series of activities to help middle school students develop an artist's vision and then convey that vision through poetry. Describes how lessons progress from looking at concrete objects to observations of settings and characters, gradually adding memory and imagination to direct observation, and finishing with revision. Notes that…

Argues that, difficult though it is to learn, revision is one of the most important components in helping students to perceive themselves as writers. Offers several teaching strategies for fostering revision. (SR)

Research suggests that students make judgments about writing at a very early age, but their interpretations of what makes writing good or bad differs in important ways from those of teachers or professional writers. An understanding of how children's evaluative criteria develop is critical to teachers in helping children become better writers.…

This guide to the Georgia Middle Grades Writing Assessment (MGWA) serves the purpose of improving writing and writing instruction. It includes a description of test administration conditions, a sample test booklet, and a structured overview of the writing assessment. Prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and proofreading are explained in the…

Written by teachers for teachers, this book offers the first-hand perspectives of 7 teachers who used the writing workshop approach. It offers teachers in grades 1-8 a wealth of practical advice, based on the personal struggles, accomplishments, and classroom-proven solutions of the authors. Equally valuable to teachers already using writing…

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)

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…

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 how the author's 6 middle school students living in a village in the Yukon, 100 miles off the road system just below the arctic circle, enthusiastically wrote stories or poems about their lives. The students shared their works via an online electronic conferencing system with students from the unimaginably different landscape of the…

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…

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)

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…