Intended for elementary school teachers in all subject areas wanting to learn more about what is known concerning the teaching of writing, this book summarizes numerous presentations made over the past four years by the many teacher/consultants working with the Bay Area Writing Project. Following introductory materials, the first section of the book examines students' writing, discussing holistic writing assessment and looking at children's writing samples to determine appropriate goals for each grade. The second section of the book focuses on the teaching of writing, exploring various philosophies and presenting nine teaching paradigms that include writing activities. The third section reviews the works of well-known researchers in the field of writing, including James Moffett and James Britton. Appendixes contain sample topics and essays from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a discussion of sentence combining, and a discussion of the rhetoric developed by Francis Christensen. (HTH)