ABSTRACT
A child, without Yeats's sixty years' experience of what writing can achieve, is too often left in the dark about what the business is for. The purposes of writing and the audience it is intended for remain unexplained or, in schools, interpreted very narrowly. Our group of teachers, faced with producing more than twenty situations for writing in six terms and restricted to some extent by the rules of the game, heaved a sigh of relief in unison at the end of the sequence. The extent and nature of the teacher's involvement, linked with choice of stimulus, inevitably determine the way children set about the task of writing. Two project teachers, in different schools and working independently, chose to use the same picture, of fire-fighting in Jacobean times, as a starting-point for writing. Experiments with photography by young children suggest that this is a powerful method of inducing speaking and writing.
