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Highly-effective, field-tested lesson plans that will help transform struggling elementary and middle school students into skilled writers
This timely book uses thinking structures to deepen student writing. It revolves around “brain pockets” to help students appreciate the qualities of different writing forms. Some powerful examples include memory pockets for personal narrative writing, fact pockets for nonfiction, and imagination pockets for story writing. Detailed lesson plans are featured along with sample anchor books and book lists. Based on extensive classroom testing, student samples throughout the book illustrate this unique approach to teaching writing. Suggestions for setting up an effective writing program and assessment tips for guiding instruction complete this comprehensive approach to developing a year-long writing program.
Featuring a wealth of real-life examples, the book helps readers to understand the default strategies students bring to the classroom, and to work collaboratively on developing these into strategies for successful writing.
This practical book provides explicit instructions for teaching sentence-level skills to students who have difficulties in this area. The author explains the key role of sentence combining in the writing process and presents effective techniques for instruction and assessment. Numerous sample lessons, practice activities, planning tips, and grammatical pointers make it easy for teachers to incorporate sentence combining and construction into the writing curriculum at all grade levels (2-12). Accessible and engaging, the book helps teachers and students experiment with different ways to arrange thoughts and produce meaningful written work.
"Writing allows each of us to live with that special wide-awakeness that comes from knowing that our lives and our ideas are worth writing about." -Lucy Calkins Teaching Writing is Lucy Calkins at her best-a distillation of the work that's placed Lucy and her colleagues at the forefront of the teaching of writing for over thirty years. This book promises to inspire teachers to teach with renewed passion and power and to invigorate the entire school day. This is a book for readers who want an introduction to the writing workshop, and for those who've lived and breathed this work for decades. Although Lucy addresses the familiar topics-the writing process, conferring, kinds of writing, and writing assessment- she helps us see those topics with new eyes. She clears away the debris to show us the teeny details, and she shows us the majesty and meaning, too, in these simple yet powerful teaching acts. Download a sample chapter for more information.
Students have trouble applying a novel's literary techniques in their own writing--so give them something short! Read aloud these personal narratives, each highlighting a different writing technique, and watch students' writing take off!
Why you need a writing revolution in your classroom and how to lead it The Writing Revolution (TWR) provides a clear method of instruction that you can use no matter what subject or grade level you teach. The model, also known as The Hochman Method, has demonstrated, over and over, that it can turn weak writers into strong communicators by focusing on specific techniques that match their needs and by providing them with targeted feedback. Insurmountable as the challenges faced by many students may seem, The Writing Revolution can make a dramatic difference. And the method does more than improve writing skills. It also helps: Boost reading comprehension Improve organizational and study skills Enhance speaking abilities Develop analytical capabilities The Writing Revolution is as much a method of teaching content as it is a method of teaching writing. There's no separate writing block and no separate writing curriculum. Instead, teachers of all subjects adapt the TWR strategies and activities to their current curriculum and weave them into their content instruction. But perhaps what's most revolutionary about the TWR method is that it takes the mystery out of learning to write well. It breaks the writing process down into manageable chunks and then has students practice the chunks they need, repeatedly, while also learning content.
