Date of Award

1986

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts in Education

Department

Education

First Advisor

Gene Henderson

Second Advisor

Nancy Polette

Abstract

Children's writing doesn't just happen. The transferring of private thoughts onto paper is a fragile and complicated press. To make the best use of instructional time and assure the quality of children's writing experiences, this author upon reviewing the current research felt a writing program based on integrating the right and left modes of thinking in a non-threatening environment was necessary. This is a curriculum designed to involve both modes of perceiving. It allows for the right hemisphere modes by encouraging clustering, body movement, color, image making, and metaphoric thinking. It enhances the left hemisphere modes by providing exercises for sequential thought, for precision, for understanding by transitions, and for step-by-step progression of ideas. Also, it requires the left brain to be used in the editing that must be done before any work is ready for publication.

This curriculum was developed to be used with fifth grade students in the regular classroom. It provides a specific set of goals and objectives, as well as questions, activities, a bibliography of available resources, methods of evaluation, and suggests where to get students' work published.

The guided writing experiences provided by this writing curriculum are intended to stimulate the imagination, enhance productive and critical thinking skills and take the risk and fear away from writing by employing teaching strategies and techniques that relieve the writer's anxiety and writers' block. By increasing these competencies, an increased interest in writing and a "positiveness" towards writing can be generated. It is an environment that can initiate an interest in "wanting to write." After all, wanting to is the initial step in the learning process.

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