As one step in the development of an instructional program designed to teach composition skills to primary-grade children, a tryout of approximately five months duration was conducted with first-grade children during the last five months of the 1969-70 school year. Fourteen classes used the composition program in conjunction with the SWRL Second-Year Communication Skills Program (SYCSP). At the end of the tryout, the story-writing performance of a random sample of children who used the composition program was compared with that of a comparable group of children who had used SYCSP without the composition program. Statistically significant differences favoring children who had used the composition program were obtained for judged quality of stories, story length, and punctuation and spelling performance. These results indicate that a carefully designed program can substantially improve certain composition skills of first-grade children. (Author/CK)