by   Karen Leggett Abouraya Each year, on the same day we learn about the life-changing Newbery and Caldecott Awards in children...

by Jacqueline Jules I remember the first time I was introduced to graphic organizers. It was a professional development day early in my...

by Jane Harrington Happy New Year to all you Pencil Tippers out there! For my own part, I’m resolving to be more resourceful with my ...

by Jane Harrington In my last post I gaily embraced the creativity of cutting and pasting summer scraps into journals to spur original ...

by Jacqueline Jules      In honor of National Poetry Month, I'd like to offer 10 tips for writing poetry. This list grows out of my per...

by Mary Amato When introducing a character, many writers begin and end with a list of the physical traits of the character: eye or hair col...

by Mary Quattlebaum As the weather warms and eyes turn from page or screen to the greening world, a field trip can help enhance students’ w...

by Jacqueline Jules Inspired by Mary Amato’s post on Sharing Mistakes, http://penciltipswritingworkshop.blogspot.com/2012/02/sharing-mistak...

by Mary Amato  Illustration by Max Amato  One of the greatest teaching tools and gifts that you can give a student is to share mistak...

by Jacqueline Jules Personal narratives are a big part of any elementary writing curriculum. Primary school students not only enjoy writing...

by Laura Krauss Melmed  This is the first in a series of planned posts on poetic devices.   I’ll start with alliteration, the repetition ...

by Pamela Ehrenberg There's a character in Camus' novel The Plague who spends several hundred pages writing a novel.   He writes t...

by Pam Smallcomb Kids love mysteries. I love mysteries, too. It’s one of the first genres I latched on to when I was young, and it has fo...

by Jacqueline Jules "Ultimately, the quality of a good piece of writing is determined by the amount of revision a writer is willing t...