Preschoolers may be novices in the area of writing but, as this article highlights, they are indeed writers. In a year-long ethnography of preschoolers during structured writing time the teacher/researcher explored how students adapted to a writing workshop format. Students participated in daily journal writing and sharing, and weekly conference…

Suggests that keeping a writer's notebook can be a unit of study in itself and that students can learn to use the notebook as a workbench for drafting, crafting, revising, and editing. Describes the author's work using writer's notebooks across several classrooms and grade levels. (RS)

Students who engage in the writing process learn to write. Period. And yet many teachers, including Lain when she was a beginning teacher, don't know how to make the time for it, how to structure it, and how to evaluate it. Here, Lain offers us the help we need by focusing on the teaching tools for introducing students to this format, the…

Reflecting a constructivist approach to teaching and learning, this book presents the content of the language arts curriculum and the most effective strategies for teaching this content. The processes of reading and writing provide the foundation for the three instructional approaches presented in the book: literature focus units, reading and…