Writing is a composite skill involving the ability to integrate different levels of knowledge, from the lower-level skills, such as spelling, punctuation and sentence construction, to the more comprehensive ones, such as text organization, coherence, and the way different written genres are structured. The activities in this section target these areas, either in isolation (‘Bingo’, ‘Making mine long’, ‘Creative copying’) or in combination (‘Running dictation’, ‘Dictogloss’ or ‘Delayed reverse translations’). What distinguishes these activities is that the emphasis is typically on collaboration (‘Collective story writing’), interaction (‘Foodies’, ‘Paper talk’) and/or creativity (‘Acrostic’ and ‘Once upon a time’, among many others). Hence, they provide a marked contrast to the somewhat solitary and formulaic nature of traditional classroom writing activities such as writing letters or essays.

From Writing Simple Poems: Pattern poetry for language acquisition by Vicki L. Holmes and Margaret R. Moulton

Procedure

1 Explain what an acrostic is: that it spells out a word in a column and then explains the word in words or phrases beginning with each letter of the word. Show the students one of the samples below (choose one appropriate for the level) and ask them to identify the word (FRIEND).