Author Description

Contributed by English teachers across the United States, the activities contained in this booklet are intended to promote the effective teaching of writing and literature. Teaching strategies offered in the first section of the booklet are designed to stimulate language exploration and include activities in which students write family newspapers that include the proper journalistic components; use clustering to write poetry; and use a variety of artistic media to illustrate the landscape of Dante's "Inferno." Activities in the second section, which are designed to stimulate an appreciation and understanding of literature, include discussions in which students cast actors to star in novels the class is studying; select a dozen powerful quotations from Alice Walker's "The Color Purple" and then investigate how Stephen Spielberg treated these passages in his film of the novel; and adopt journalistic roles that enable them to produce a historical newspaper from a time and place depicted in a novel. Teaching ideas in the third section provide the means for students to learn about various stages of the writing process. These include activities in which students become consumer reporters; engage in mocked-up conversations for practice in writing dialogue; and make "poetry earrings" by writing pithy metaphoric statements or haikus on small, rectangular pieces of paper. (SAM).