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Literary Cavalcade, the magazine for student writers published by Scholastic, has made an archive of some of its best articles for young writers available through the Teacher Center. For Writing Our Future, see especially three useful pieces on persuasive writing: Introduction to a Persuasive Essay (November/ December 2003), Persuasive Essay- Writing a Well-Crafted Argument (January 2004), and The Power to Persuade (January 2005). Students nearing publication will appreciate Polish Your Prose (May 2004). All are available as PDFs that you can share with your young writers.

In this series of lessons, students analyze letters to the editor as genre and then write their own. The lessons include time with the letter generator and persuasion map for students on computers.

NOW, the public affairs program on PBS, has created a large body of excellent content based on its programs for teachers and students. This collection of lessons and links supports students creating opinion pieces based on research through the NOW archives and related news links. This is an excellent introduction for students for to opinion-writing and to news sources.

This unit plan, developed for students 3 - 5, offers ideas and approaches that would work well with older students if adapted. The approach is to engage students in examining persuasive communication all around them, discerning rhetorical strategies that seem effective to them as readers and viewers. Having students see how ubiquitous persuasive communication is helps take this writing assignment out of the realm of 'school only' writing. The associated materials are clearly developed for younger students, but suggest approaches to materials that could be used more broadly. While on the site, run a search to find other content of interest.

As always, Carla Beard of the Web English Teacher gathers an extensive set of resource links for the busy teacher. This link to the general search section for writing offers many options for resources.

The editorial board of any newspaper needs to identify issues of significance to plan their editorial publishing. In this ASNE High School Journalism lesson, a class works to identify the core issues that might be the topic of their editorial board work. Similar processes could help teachers surface issues that young writers might want to advocate for in Writing Our Future.

The ASNE High School Journalism initiative has built an excellent site to support excellence in scholastic journalism. It features a range of lesson plans and tips that are applicable to Writing Our Future, particularly those that focus on writing editorials. This unit, for example, leads students to analyze editorials from newspapers in order to derive tips for their own writing. As a result, students begin to see how much of the writing around them can serve as a model for their own work.

This lesson on persuasive writing has students writing letters to the editor related to the election and could provide some starting points for teachers or mentors browsing for ideas. The lesson includes rubrics and other tools that might be useful to teachers working on Writing Our Future.