As teachers, the beginning of each school year presents us with fresh starts and opportunities. How will we build community and create a culture that values thinking, learning, and risk-taking? How can we create a safe environment where all learners feel welcome and valued? As writing teachers, it's of utmost importance that we launch our students into the world of writing in a way that engages them and helps to build their confidence. In this book, Kelly Boswell shares a variety of ways to kick-start the school year and invite students to engage in meaningful, purposeful and joyful writing experiences.
As teachers, the beginning of each school year presents us with fresh starts and opportunities. How will we build community and create a culture that values thinking, learning, and risk-taking? How can we create a safe environment where all learners feel welcome and valued? As writing teachers, it's of utmost importance that we launch our students into the world of writing in a way that engages them and helps to build their confidence. In this book, Kelly Boswell shares a variety of ways to kick-start the school year and invite students to engage in meaningful, purposeful and joyful writing experiences.
“Toor’s style is friendly, funny, and genuinely compelling, exhorting students to go deeper with their writing even (and especially) when the stakes are high.” —School Library Journal Writing, for most of us, is bound up with anxiety. It’s even worse when it feels like your whole future—or at least where you’ll spend the next four years in college—is on the line. It’s easy to understand why so many high school seniors put off working on their applications until the last minute or end up with a generic and clichéd essay. The good news? You already have the “secret sauce” for crafting a compelling personal essay: your own experiences and your unique voice. The best essays rarely catalog how students have succeeded or achieved. Good writing shows the reader how you’ve struggled and describes mistakes you’ve made. Excellent essays express what you’re fired up about, illustrate how you think, and illuminate the ways you’ve grown. More than twenty million students apply to college every year; many of them look similar in terms of test scores, grades, courses taken, extracurricular activities. Admissions officers wade through piles of files. As an applicant, you need to think about what will interest an exhausted reader. What can you write that will make her argue to admit you instead of the thousands of other applicants? A good essay will be conversational and rich in vivid details, and it could only be written by one person—you. This book will help you figure out how to find and present the best in yourself. You’ll acquire some useful tools for writing well—and may even have fun—in the process.
Many children avoid writing for a number of reasons – perhaps they find it tedious or frustrating, or perhaps they have dyslexia or dysgraphia. This structured programme of writing activities and lessons makes writing engaging and accessible for reluctant writers, by encouraging primary teachers and learners to work together to develop children's writing skills. The book covers all aspects of primary school writing, including grammar, sentence development, punctuation, paragraph writing and planning. It also shows teachers how to develop self-sufficiency skills in writing and encourage learner independence. Each section in the book builds on previous skills learned, from word level up to creative writing skills, providing pupils with a complete range of writing tools. The ready-to-use resources for each topic - including mini lessons, discovery tools and activities - offer extensions and adaptations to suit all pupil needs, including fun ideas for multisensory learning, group interventions or to keep pupils learning outside of the classroom. For school staff working with children who find writing challenging, this practical toolkit provides a range of activities based on solid research and hands-on experience that can be incorporated straight into lessons and teaching practices.
Modeling is one of the most effective of all teaching strategies and yet many teachers overlook this powerful tool in writing instruction. When teachers think aloud and then craft a piece of writing in front of their students, they give student writers a peek into what is possible in their own writing. In this book, Kelly Boswell shows you how to transform student writers by infusing short bursts of purposeful teacher modeling. As students watch an adult writer think, talk, and write, they can develop the skills needed in order to create writing that is both polished and purposeful. Tony Stead, educator, internationally known literacy specialist and author, says, "Finally Not just another book about how to teach writing, but one that targets the power of modeled writing. What a delight it is to read this professional resource that highlights the importance of this strategy as the cornerstone to successful teaching and learning of the writing process."
George Orwell set out ‘to make political writing into an art’, and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell’s essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. In Why I Write, the first in the Orwell’s Essays series, Orwell describes his journey to becoming a writer, and his movement from writing poems to short stories to the essays, fiction and non-fiction we remember him for. He also discusses what he sees as the ‘four great motives for writing’ – ‘sheer egoism’, ‘aesthetic enthusiasm’, ‘historical impulse’ and ‘political purpose’ – and considers the importance of keeping these in balance. Why I Write is a unique opportunity to look into Orwell’s mind, and it grants the reader an entirely different vantage point from which to consider the rest of the great writer’s oeuvre. 'A writer who can – and must – be rediscovered with every age.' — Irish Times
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In her entertaining and edifying New York Times bestseller, acclaimed author Francine Prose invites you to sit by her side and take a guided tour of the tools and tricks of the masters to discover why their work has endured. Written with passion, humour and wisdom, Reading Like a Writer will inspire readers to return to literature with a fresh eye and an eager heart – to take pleasure in the long and magnificent sentences of Philip Roth and the breathtaking paragraphs of Isaac Babel; to look to John le Carré for a lesson in how to advance plot through dialogue and to Flannery O’ Connor for the cunning use of the telling detail; to be inspired by Emily Brontë ’ s structural nuance and Charles Dickens’ s deceptively simple narrative techniques. Most importantly, Prose cautions readers to slow down and pay attention to words, the raw material out of which all literature is crafted, and reminds us that good writing comes out of good reading.
Outlines "steps of writing a story from beginning to end. Learn how to gather inspiration and develop a story's characters. Then visualize and organize your story's plot with a writing map. And after you've written a really rough draft, check out tips for revising your work"--Page 4 of cover.
As teachers, the beginning of each school year presents us with fresh starts and opportunities. How will we build community and create a culture that values thinking, learning, and risk-taking? How can we create a safe environment where all learners feel welcome and valued? As writing teachers, it’s of utmost importance that we launch our students into the world of writing in a way that engages them and helps to build their confidence. In this book, Kelly Boswell shares a variety of ways to kick-start the school year and invite students to engage in meaningful, purposeful and joyful writing experiences.
