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Homeschoolers will make writing exciting with this collection of high-interest writing challenges. From producing advertisements and news articles to creating stories and poetry, this book will encourage students to develop their communication skills and discover their creativity by tackling a diverse array of writing assignments.
Inventive activities give teachers details they need to present engaging lesson on writing an entertaining beginning, building suspense, adding detail, developing story endings and using dialogue effectively. Wake kids up to good writing skills. Illustrations throughout.
Tap into your inner writer with this book of practical advice by the bestselling author of How Writers Work and the ALA Notable Book Fig Pudding. Writers are just like everyone else—except for one big difference. Most people go through life experiencing daily thoughts and feelings, noticing and observing the world around them. But writers record these thoughts and observations. They react. And they need a special place to record those reactions. Perfect for classrooms, A Writer’s Notebook gives budding writers a place to keep track of all the little things they notice every day. Young writers will love these useful tips for how to use notes and jottings to create stories and poems of their own.
Writing is all about making meaning. The prospect of teaching writing to a classroom full of students—some who speak English and some who don't, can be overwhelming. When students learning English are at different levels, the task is even more challenging. Writing Sense: Integrated Reading and Writing Lessons for English Language Learners outlines the classroom conditions necessary for successful writing instruction with English language learners, whether in writing workshop and/or small-group instruction. It includes 68 classroom-tested lessons for grades K 8 that show kids at all levels of language acquisition how to make connections, ask questions, visualize (make mental images), infer, determine importance, synthesize, monitor meaning and comprehension, and use fix-up strategies. The five main sections are geared to the stages of language proficiency, and lessons are divided into younger and older students, spanning kindergarten through to grade eight. There are extensive lists of suggested books for mentor texts as well as lists of mentor authors to facilitate teachers' planning and instruction.
The practices you will find in this book have been used effectively by many teachers. Here they are altered and redesigned with special attention to the CCSS-in a way that maintains the potential for teacher control and decision making in the best interest of learners. -Gretchen Owocki Whether it's developing arguments, writing informational texts, or pulling evidence from literary and informational texts to support their claims, the Common Core asks students to do the hard work of higher-level writing across the content areas. To help with the hard work of teaching, The Common Core Writing Book, 6-8 presents a comprehensive framework of strategies and lessons for enhancing or building a middle school writing curriculum. Within each section, you will find a set of instructional practices-demonstrations, collaborative engagements, and independent applications- that allow students to gradually take control of complex thinking and activity. Gretchen Owocki covers not only the English Language Arts standards, but all the writing standards for literacy in social studies, science, and technical subjects. She identifies those lessons that work best in content-area classrooms, offers suggestions for cross-disciplinary collaboration, and provides common language for teachers across the disciplines. She shares resources and supports such as: decision trees that help you differentiate by matching students to lessons assessment tools to determine writers' needs instructional strategies, including minilessons dozens of reproducibles, including mentor texts, graphic organizers, and planning templates for writers. "Effective teaching," writes Gretchen, "is about taking note of learners' knowledge, engagement, and responses to instruction-and shaping instruction around what is observed." With her Common Core Writing Book, 6-8 you'll have a robust set of meaningful, authentic lessons and tools for not only teaching well but creating and sustaining engagement so that your writers continue to improve across the year.
Meet the diverse learning needs of students with intriguing projects that include advertising posters, comic books, broadcast news stories, and magazine articles.
"My whole goal with this book was to come at teaching writing from the angle that matters most: students' perspective. They taught me what I needed to know to make this book live up to their passion for writing." Laura Robb Adolescents have robust and rewarding writing lives outside of school that involve journals, emails, text messages, blogs, and an astounding array of genres. Unlike their personal reading lives that teachers frequently tap into, their personal writings typically exist under the curricular radar-that is until now. While grounded in the common schedule constraints and curriculum demands of middle school, Laura Robb's Teaching Middle School Writers offers teachers lessons and routines that are uncommonly attuned to adolescents' developmental and social needs. As she taps into the energy and enthusiasm of adolescents' personal writing lives, Laura presents: writing plans that support first drafts strategies for crafting leads that grab and endings that satisfy grammar lessons that address writing conventions editing lessons that have students revise their writing before the teacher reads it guidelines for grading and responding to student work. Straight-from-the-classroom writing samples and videos give teachers the opportunity to see how Laura uses compelling questions and powerful mentor texts to teach writing, support struggling writers, and weave twenty-first century literacies into the writing curriculum. Throughout, teachers learn ways of connecting to students' lives in order to bring out their best writing, their best self. Watch a video overview.
The idea behind Poetry Writing and Study for Middle Grades is to help middle school teachers, charter school instructors, and home educators integrate formal poetry writing and the study of classical poetic structures into their middle school level courses. This text is set up in a once a week format, allowing educators to integrate it into their current curriculum easily and, hopefully, seamlessly. Poetry Writing and Study for Middle Grades is designed as an introductory writing text covering grades 6-9, with a specific focus on poetry devices and writing. Educators may want to include additional materials to focus more on different aspects of poetry and critical thinking for higher or more advanced students. Educators can also include the added activities, and separate grammar and language arts for a complete, semester long Middle School English credit class.
In this book, Dr. Timothy Horan presents an original and highly effective writing program whose major goal is to transform middle school students into competent and confident writers. This writing program is innovative, rigorous, and engaging, and was designed with the student in mind. This book contains a total of twenty original writing assignments—ten for seventh grade, and another ten for eighth grade. These assignments are based on middle school students’ natural predilections and developmental levels, and represent creative interpretations of the Common Core Writing Standards. Each writing project in this book is full and complete, and is described with clarity and simplicity. Each assignment also includes a reproducible outline that presents the assignment to students in a simplified graphical format. The pedagogical philosophy underlying this program is simple and effective. It seeks to provide students with enjoyable writing assignments that students will understand, learn from, and complete. As students progress through the program, they will develop an upbeat emotional bond with the act of writing, and will learn to approach composition with a sense of optimism and confidence.
