Editorial comment.

Fellowes, Janet ; Oakley, Grace

Dear Practically Primary readers,

This is our final edition as the editors of Practically Primary and we would like to take this opportunity to send our thoughts and appreciation to you. We have had a wonderful time bringing together the different editions of the magazine and, in so doing, working with many teachers and other literacy educators throughout Australia. It is obvious that literacy ideas and teaching excellence abounds plentifully inside classrooms, and we hope that you will continue to share what you do well. It is people's willingness to write their teaching stories and share them with Practically Primary readers that ensures the magazine remains a relevant and practical magazine. We look forward to continue to support the work of ALEA and of literacy education in the coming years.

In this edition of Practically Primary we bring you a rich and varied array of articles about the teaching of writing.

Writing is a widely used mode of communication and a complex process for which children need to learn to orchestrate various skills, understandings and processes to produce a text. In supporting children to become competent and motivated writers, teachers need to provide them with many diverse experiences of the reading and writing of texts and with focused teaching of the various skills and understandings of the writing process. We are sure that the ideas within these pages will contribute positively to your writing program. The articles feature such topics as narrative writing, sports-based writing activities, letter writing, teachable moments, electronic language experience writing, engaging struggling writers and poetry.

Given the important role of writing in school and society, teachers need to place high emphasis on the teaching of writing and make it both a meaningful and pleasurable experience for students. Successful writing programs require that children are given adequate time to write each week as well as authentic responses to the communicative content of the texts produced. In addition to experiences in writing texts, skills, processes and understandings need to be explicitly taught. Students require focused word and sentence level work, within the context of the whole texts, where phonics, spelling, grammar and punctuation knowledge are developed.

We welcome the new editor of Practically Primary, Dr Gloria Latham. She is looking forward to taking over the editorial role and to working with teachers and others to prepare articles for future Practically Primary editions. The themes for the next two editions will be, Giving Voice to Literacy and Text Talk: Literature studies ... start writing!