We began by teaching the class as a whole using a PowerPoint we created. We found a fabulous song in the professional book Memory-Boosing Mnemonic Songs for Content Area Learning called The Writing Process. I found this resource in the teacher store on Scholastic.com. We acted the song out as a class (we love to sing and dance). We then divided the students into six different "rides" on the carousel. I'm going to focus on two of our favorites. The first one was jump rope jingles. We used books on jingles (Miss Mary Mack) and listened to double-dutch records (yes, the old vinyl kind). We practiced jumping as well. The students paired off and researched the rhymes and patterns. They picked one to mimic with their own words. After they were done, they performed them for us. The next ride started with us practicing using a thesaurus to learn bigger words to replace our baby words. The students kept up with nouns, adjectives, and verbs they researched in a mini-journal. The activity was writing a descriptive paragraph. We wanted to have them write newspaper articles. We found great games for the students to play to build their writing skills on Scholastic.com . We really liked News Hangman (under the Social Studies tab), but they also played Pick the Perfect Word and Clean Up Grammar at the Beach (both under the Language Arts tab). The main project was also from the computer lab favorites (called, Story Starters). Each student went to the computer, clicked on Story Starters where they could pick the parts of their paragraph. The only requirement was they were to pick the newspaper article as their form. The articles turned out fabulous and the kids loved it! It was one of their favorite activities. It made it simple to differentiate for the class.