Even very young children can learn a repertoire of elaboration techniques to take their writing from bland to exciting. In this resource, a veteran teacher shares the mini-lessons and strategies she created to teach children how to develop their writing by adding definitions, asking questions, using visualizations, and lots more. For each technique, she's included an imaginative and delightful example from children's literature that shows how effective the technique is. The strategies and lessons can be used for teaching nonfiction and fiction during shared, guided, and independent writing. Includes record-keeping forms that make it easy to document students' growth, as well as writing prompts to help prepare them for standardized assessments.