You're right. She did use writing. I hadn't even noticed it because I was thinking about classroom environment when writing that essay, and I had moved on.
We were very proud of our science notebooks. She taught us to record notes in an organized sort of way. I don't know if this is in sinc with modern teaching theory - a lot of the notebook was carefully copied diagrams, pictures, and organizers. We didn't design them ourselves, she did. She insisted on neat and correct illustrations, complete with colors from colored pencils (a luxury item back then). If I had students do this now I think I would get them involved in the process of designing how the diagrams and illustrations should be.
We also wrote out experiment plans, and had to convince her that our plans were good ones. I felt good when she approved your plans and said nice things about them.
I remember one day when we had to think and write a plan to convince an alien from another planet of the existance of air on Earth. Then she played the alien and we had to one at a time read our papers and / or demonstrate something to convince her. We never did convince her of the existance of air, but we all got pretty wound up and involved.
We could write science books reports for extra credit.
Thanks, I'll keep thinking of how we used writing.