Setting the Mood

Usually my son gives me a play-by-play of what he's working on at school.

But the past couple of week, his Language Arts class has been concentrating entirely on writing to prep for a standardized exam. And somehow he neglected to tell me until a couple of days ago. :)

I guess he thinks I'll be entirely too interested. He's right. Writing, I think, is hard to teach, and I'm curious how people approach it.

In preparation for this exam, the school had each of the six 7th grade English...