Study Driven: A Framework for Planning Units of Study in the Writing Workshop Review

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(More customer reviews)Why isn't this book more widely read? Wood-Ray offers excellent direction to teachers - at all grade levels - who are seeking to improve the instruction of writing. Her central ideas are:
1.Texts should be used to mentor students to write real things in the ways real writers write.
2.Writing needs to be `studied' and not `taught.'
3.Teachers need to be writers and gatherers of mentor texts, but curriculum can not be determined before the students begin to study.
For teachers who want their students to write well, this is a text that lays out options for letting this happen. You'll want to spend a summer reading it and thinking, so that when you return, you'll be ready for superior kind pedagogy. It is rare for a book to speak so compellingly to all teachers, Kindergarten to College, but I believe that Study Driven is the wonderful exception.

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No matter what grade you teach, what state your school is in, and what level of diversity is present in your classroom, students have the right to be shown real-world examples of the kinds of writing they're asked to produce. For Katie Wood Ray, this foundational idea is also the beginning of an important way of approaching rigorous writing instruction.

In Study Driven Ray shows you that encouraging students to read closely can improve the effectiveness of your writing instruction. Detailing her own method for utilizing the popular mentor-texts approach, Ray helps you immerse children in a close study of published texts that supports their learning, leads them to a better understanding of the traits of good writing, and motivates them to become more accomplished writers.

Ray shows you how to set up your writing workshop to facilitate close study. From grounded understandings to informed practice to supportive resources, she demonstrates:
how to find a rich variety of texts that give students a clear vision of the writing you want them to do
how to strategically select texts to support whole-class learning as well as individual choice
how your teaching language gives structure to curriculum development and student learning
how good planning turns curricular standards and objectives into sensible units of study
why depth can be a more practical and effective curricular goal than breadth in writing instruction


Study Driven also gives you the ideas and resources for thirty units of study, ranging from genres to punctuation and appropriate across grade levels.

Get students into the habit of studying what they read to help them plan their writing. Give them examples of real-world texts as well as the structure, the space, the time, and the guidance to change and grow as writers. Give yourself Study Driven and find out how.

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Everyday Editing Review

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(More customer reviews)Jeff Anderson's book offers lots of practical ideas for tweaking your writer's workshop and making your students better writers. He devotes chapters to various skills and how to teach them (serial commas, appositives, participles, etc.). One of his basic tenets is selecting good examples of sentences from your own readings of YA books, then using them as teaching tools by asking kids what they notice (it might be how appositives are punctuated, or how the colon introduces a list). The sentences interest the kids because they are taken from high interest books, and instead of learning from BAD sentences that are riddled with mistakes for correction, students learn from models that are free of mistakes (novel thought -- "mentor" sentences instead of "mental" ones).
You can find plenty of sentences to use in your own readings, but if you don't have time, Anderson provides examples for you in this book. He also devises sentence combining activities by "deconstructing" good mentor sentences and asking students to put them together again (where's Humpty Dumpty when you need him?). Again, great idea. Studies have proven that sentence combining is an effective teaching tool.
I just used Anderson's idea for creating an Appositive Book with separate flaps for the subject, the appositive, and the verb parts of the sentences and my students loved it. By raising different flaps in the partitioned book, they were able to create some amusing (OK, silly) sentences using appositives. It's stuff like this that makes stuff like grammar (the Teflon of our teaching chores) stick!
Recommendation: Buy. Then use. Frequently.

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Editing is often seen as one item on a list of steps in the writing process—usually put somewhere near the end, and often completely crowded out of writer's workshop.Too many times daily editing lessons happen in a vacuum, with no relationship to what students are writing.

In Everyday Editing, Jeff Anderson asks teachers to reflect on what sort of message this approach sends to students.Does it tell them that editing and revision are meaningful parts of the writing process, or just a hunt for errors with a 50/50 chance of getting it right—comma or no comma?

Instead of rehearsing errors and drilling students on what's wrong with a sentence, Jeffinvites students to look carefully at their writing along with mentor texts, and to think about how punctuation, grammar, and style can be best used to hone and communicate meaning.

Written in Jeff's characteristically witty style, this refreshing and practical guide offers an overview of his approach to editing within the writing workshop as well as ten detailed sets of lessons covering everything from apostrophes to serial commas. These lessons can be used throughout the year to replace Daily Oral Language or error-based editing strategies with a more effective method for improving student writing.

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Mechanically Inclined: Building Grammar, Usage, and Style into Writer's Workshop Review

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(More customer reviews)In MECHANICALLY INCLINED, Jeff Anderson tackles the issue of grammarphobia and edit-phobia head on. You know the diseases. They are endemic in English classrooms everywhere.
Anderson advocates using "mentor" sentences and paragraphs taken from books that interest students. He also details how to set up a writer's notebook where kids can write freely without fear of the Red Pen (which, to them, is like an invader from the Red Planet, as narrated by Orson Welles). The notebook includes sections for creativity, exploration, modeling, and copying well-written sentences and paragraphs.
I especially like Anderson's idea for the Editing Checkout, where students "scan" work looking for specific skills, then create a "receipt" of their findings. NATIONAL ENQUIRERS are not necessary for this activity. The kids will get a kick out of it and (not too loud, now) will learn something about editing (with one pen, two pens, red pens, or blue pens) while they're at it. What more could a teacher ask for? (OK, don't answer that...)

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Some teachers love grammar and some hate it, but nearly all struggle to find ways of making the mechanics of English meaningful to kids. As a middle school teacher, Jeff Anderson also discovered that his students were not grasping the basics, and that it was preventing them from reaching their potential as writers. Jeff readily admits, "I am not a grammarian, nor am I punctilious about anything," so he began researching and testing the ideas of scores of grammar experts in his classroom, gradually finding successful ways of integrating grammar instruction into writer's workshop.

Mechanically Inclined is the culmination of years of experimentation that merges the best of writer's workshop elements with relevant theory about how and why skills should be taught. It connects theory about using grammar in context with practical instructional strategies, explains why kids often don't understand or apply grammar and mechanics correctly, focuses on attending to the "high payoff," or most common errors in student writing, and shows how to carefully construct a workshop environment that can best support grammar and mechanics concepts. Jeff emphasizes four key elements in his teaching:
short daily instruction in grammar and mechanics within writer's workshop;
using high-quality mentor texts to teach grammar and mechanics in context;
visual scaffolds, including wall charts, and visual cues that can be pasted into writer's notebooks;
regular, short routines, like "express-lane edits," that help students spot and correct errors automatically.

Comprising an overview of the research-based context for grammar instruction, a series of over thirty detailed lessons, and an appendix of helpful forms and instructional tools, Mechanically Inclined is a boon to teachers regardless of their level of grammar-phobia. It shifts the negative, rule-plagued emphasis of much grammar instruction into one which celebrates the power and beauty these tools have in shaping all forms of writing.

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Mentor Texts: Teaching Writing Through Children's Literature, K-6 Review

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(More customer reviews)This is one of the best resources for teaching writing that I have ever purchased. It's very "user friendly" with the "Your Turn" lessons and it's packed with great strategies and plenty of quality picture book titles to use for classroom "read like a writer" lessons on author's craft. As a literacy facilitator for my school, I have recommended that my principal purchase more copies for our third grade teachers to use this year for process writing minilessons and strategies that link reading to writing. Congratulations to the authors for an outstanding resource! Katie Wood Ray would approve, I'm sure!

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How do children's book authors create the wonder that we feel when reading our favorite books? What can students and teachers learn from these authors and books if we let them serve as writing mentors? In Mentor Texts, Lynne Dorfman and Rose Cappelli show teachers how to help students become confident, accomplished writers, using literature as their foundation.

The book is organized around the characteristics of good writing focus, content, organization, style, and conventions and includes:
mentor texts that can be used to scaffold student work;
student writing examples to demonstrate how students take risks as writers;
teacher writing examples to show the power of teacher as writer;
a comprehensive annotated list of children's literature that includes specific suggestions for teaching points;
Your Turn lessons at the end of each chapter that show how to put the ideas into practice.

Rose and Lynne write in a friendly and conversational style, employing numerous anecdotes to help teachers visualize the process, and offer strategies that can be immediately implemented in the classroom. Each Your Turn lesson is built around the gradual release of responsibility model, offering suggestions for demonstrations and shared or guided writing. Reflection is emphasized as a necessary component to understanding why mentor authors chose certain strategies, literary devices, sentence structures, and words.

This practical resource demonstrates the power of learning to read like writers. It shows teachers and students how to discover the ways that authors make writing come alive, and how to use that knowledge to inspire and improve their own writing.

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