The Common Core State Standards for the English Language Arts, together with the new tests being developed to assess them, are placing a greater emphasis on writing in elementary schools than in the recent past. This article explores similarities and differences of the standards with past state standards, explaining the reason both for why things have been as they are and why Common Core is encouraging change. The biggest shift in writing instruction is claimed to be the new emphasis on writing about text, and ways of writing about text successfully in the elementary grades (summarization, analysis, synthesis, modeling) are described.