Veteran teacher Marilyn Pryle knows first hand the challenges of teaching writing workshop in middle school. She has fine-tuned her approach over the years and now shares her classroom-tested strategies in this step-by-step guide. She shows you how to establish routines, set high expectations, plan assignments that balance structure and choice, sequence mini-lessons to maximize students' learning, design rubrics to ease the grading dilemma and encourage revision, and so much more. With management tips, scheduling options, test-prep ideas, ELL supports, and conferencing how-to's, this is the essential resource for teaching writing workshop in middle school!
When writing workshop first blossomed in classrooms, its hallmarks were genuine curiosity, individual choice, quality conversations, and engaging children's literature. A joyous hum of intention, creativity, and craft enlivened the school day. But today's teachers are often faced with a range of obstacles, as new initiatives are embraced, mandates handed down, and scripted programs purchased. Sometimes teachers must sacrifice the original principles of writing workshop and lose that joyous hum. Above and Beyond the Writing Workshop by Shelley Harwayne is filled with original, joyful writing challenges designed to bring back the spirit of the original writing workshop model while encouraging educators to enhance it through invention, innovation, and inspiration. These challenges are meant to generate other lessons and other projects, as teachers come to realize that teaching writing is not only possible but perhaps the most important, relevant, and gratifying part of their instruction. Shelley invites teachers to keep the groundbreaking spirit alive by: taking back their writing workshops finding time for professional conversations trying out new ideas in the company of colleagues encouraging children to be inquisitive, outspoken, and independent reminding children how fascinating the world is helping students delight in figuring out how things work and then teaching others what they have learned offering children an opportunity to think deeply about their passions and giving one another new things to love showing children that high quality writing can and will make a difference in the world. Shelley believes children who write what matters to them - their experiences, their beliefs, their observations - will find their lives enhanced. She seeks to raise activists who, by becoming more aware of the world and asking why things are the way they are, will be empowered to make it better.
Stacey Shubitz and Lynne Dorfman welcome you to experience the writing workshop for the first time or in a new light with Welcome to Writing Workshop: Engaging Today's Students with a Model That Works . Through strategic routines, tips, resources, and short focused video clips, teachers can create the sights and sounds of a thriving writing workshop where:• Both students and teachers are working authors• Students spend most of their time writing—not just learning about it• Student choice is encouraged to help create engaged writers, not compliant ones• Students are part of the formative assessment process• Students will look forward to writing time—not dread it.From explanations of writing process and writing traits to small-group strategy lessons and mini-lessons, this book will provide the know-how to feel confident and comfortable in the teaching of writers.
"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.
"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.
The Middle School Writing Toolkit addresses the 5 major writing genres that middle-school students are expected to master - reports, persuasive essays, how-to (procedural) essays, narratives, and literary responses - and provides 57 mini-lessons and more than 200 workstation tasks to start English teachers well on their way to creating a successful writing program in the classroom.
