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Craft Lessons Review

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(More customer reviews)This is one of the best books I've seen for helping teach students to be better writers. It gives short minilessons that can give ideas and teach writing techniques with examples. I love it. I wouldn't teach writing without it

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Craft is the cauldron in which the writing gets forged.

Ralph Fletcher and JoAnn Portalupi argue that too often we concentrate on the beginning and ending of the writing process—conceiving and correcting—while leaving students on their own to make a thousand critical decisions in their writing about crafting leads, voice, structure, supporting detail, setting, mood, and character.

What elements of craft can we teach student writers, and at what age are they ready to learn them? This book answers both questions. Craft Lessons is the practical text for the over-scheduled writing teacher who wants to give students fresh challenges for their writing but doesn't have time to pore over dozens of trade books to do so.

There are three main sections in the book: one geared for teachers of primary students, one for teachers of grades 3-4, and one for teachers of middle school writers. This developmental structure allows teachers to go directly to those craft lessons most applicable and adaptable to their own students. Each of the 78 lessons is presented on a single page in an easy-to-read format. And every lesson features three teaching guidelines:Discussion—A brief look at the reasons for teaching the particular element of craft.How to Teach It—Concrete language showing exactly how a teacher might bring this craft element to students in individual writing conferences or a small-group setting.Resource Material—A listing of the book or text referred to in the craft lesson plus additional texts you can use and references to a passage, a poem, or a piece of student writing in the Appendixes.Craft Lessons also explores the context—the crucial classroom conditions—for successfully bringing rich ideas to young writers. It will appeal to both experienced writing teachers seeking new horizons for their writers and teachers who are relatively new to teaching writing.

Be sure to take a look at Nonfiction Craft Lessons: Teaching Information Writing K-8 and the When Students Write videotapes.

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Differentiated Instruction for the Middle School Science Teacher: Activities and Strategies for an Inclusive Classroom (Differentiated Instruction for Middle School Teachers) Review

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(More customer reviews)As a member of a child study team, I am always happy to refer special resources to the teachers with whom I work. In the past, Joan D'Amico's books have been met with tremendous excitement and enthusiasm so it was with great anticipation that I awaited her newest book, "Differentiated Instruction for the Middle School Science Teacher." I was certainly not disappointed. This book includes learning tools for children who are gifted, average, learning disabled and physically disabled, in a very interactive and creative format. The activities are fun and the children become so involved that they forget that the purpose is to learn, although that is exactly what they are doing. This latest book is one that I look forward to recommending and one that I know the teachers will be thrilled to use.
Anne Gunar, L.C.S.W.

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An indispensable guide for middle school science teachers who have inclusive classrooms
The third volume in the Differentiated Instruction series, Differentiated Instruction for the Middle School Science Teacher offers teachers proven techniques for designing and delivering effective science instruction, measuring success, getting students to work together, and collaborating with other professionals. The ready-to-use activities are tied to core curriculum standards for middle school students and each lesson incorporates adaptations for students with different learning needs.
Includes strategies for teaching a standards-based science curriculum
Contains a wealth of activities that can be adapted for learners of all abilities
Offers information for delivering effective instruction, measuring success, and student collaboration

The authors, both experienced teachers, offer a range of techniques, such as station/group activities, enrichment activities, and modifications for students with specific disabilities.

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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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Writing Workshop: The Essential Guide Review

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(More customer reviews)I have taught writing for the past five years utilizing the teaching structure, writing workshop. I have also taught teachers how to teach using writing workshop and this has been the most helpful book in training new teachers. It is an easy read with lots of timelines, teacher guides, quick summaries at the end of chapters and practical advice. There are a lot of books out there about writing workshop, but this one is concise, clear and enjoyable to read. This is worth the money! Enjoy :)

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Is the writing workshop the only way to teach writing? No. There are a variety of approaches or programs, but none of them matches the writing workshop when it comes to growing strong writers. That's why, despite the pressures of testing, the writing workshop has endured and even flourished in thousands of schools across the country.

Today we face a time when as many as ten million new teachers are entering the profession. It is for these teachers, and others who are unfamiliar with writing workshop, that Ralph Fletcher and JoAnn Portalupi wrote this book - as a way to introduce and explain the writing workshop . . . to reveal what a potent tool the writing workshop can be for empowering young writers.

Above all Writing Workshop is a practical book, providing everything a teacher needs to get the writing workshop up and running. In clear language, Fletcher and Portalupi explain the simple principles that underlie the writing workshop and explore the major components that make it work. Each chapter addresses an essential element, then suggests five or six specific things a teacher can do to implement the idea under discussion. There's also a separate chapter entitled "What About Skills," which shows how to effectively teach skills in the context of writing. The book closes with practical forms in the appendixes to ensure that the workshop runs smoothly.

Fletcher and Portalupi's twenty-plus years working with teachers have convinced them that there is no better way to teach writing. This important book is the culmination of all their years of effort, a synthesis of their best thinking on the subject.

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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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Constructing Meaning Through Kid-Friendly Comprehension Strategy Instruction Review

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(More customer reviews)This book is full of practical and kid friendly comprehension strategies that any teacher can use to help students with comprehension. There are charts/posters, sample lessons, and reading activity forms that can be reproduced or forms may be downloaded by a CD that is included with the book. The reading strategy activity forms can be used with a book of your choice to teach a specific reading comprehension strategy. Dr. Nancy Boyles also recommended a bibliography of books to teach each strategy. This is a great book to read if you are still searching for reading strategies to help your class with comprehension.

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Good readers think about reading whilethey are reading. But how does a teacher teach students to apply comprehension strategies as they read?By applying the explicit teaching model to comprehension strategy instruction, Dr. Nancy Boyles offers teachers an easy, effective, and innovative approach to improve students' reading comprehension. Using her book--rich with models, teacher-talk,and real-life examples--teachers learn how to explicitly teach students to apply comprehension strategies competently while they read. And with Dr. Boyles' detailed lesson plans and templates, teachers can embed comprehension strategy instruction into guided, shared, and independent reading for both literacy and content-area instruction.Constructing Meaning shows teachers:* A kid-friendly way to introduce and model a blended repertoire of comprehension strategies concurrently, so students practice strategies as readers actually use them: flexibly and as an integrated whole while reading.* How to refine students' comprehension of fiction and informational text during shared, guided, and independent reading with focused lessons in specific strategy applications.* How to monitor students' progress in reading comprehension and comprehension strategy use through follow-up activities, rubrics with discrete assessment criteria, and questions that make kids think.Teachers can reproduce classroom-ready visual supports from the book or customize them from the included CD.

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The Middle School Writing Toolkit Review

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(More customer reviews)If you are a middle school teacher, this book is a must-have! I'm a fairly new teacher and this book has given me enough material to run my writer's workshop for months. There are tons of lessons and assignments here that you can use the day you get the book. The lessons are very straightforward and easy to use. Each writing strand has its own chapter and set of lessons that help you teach any of the major writing genres, including persuasive, literary essay, narratives, how to, and reports.
My school is moving toward differentiated instruction in writing, so this book is a blessing. Each lesson has four writing tasks associated with it, from easy to challenging ones. Not only that, but this book takes you step by step through the process of teaching a differentiated lesson to a heterogeneously grouped class. I think this alone is priceless!
There are tasks, rubrics, charts--everything you'd want in a book about middle school writing.
Highly recommended!

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Designed specifically for all middle-school teachers, The Middle School Writing Toolkit has everything needed to get your writer's workshop up and running whether you're a language arts teacher looking for new writing workshop ideas or a subject-area teacher who wants to improve the quality of student papers.
The Middle School Writing Toolkit addresses the five major writing genres that middle-school students are expected to master reports, persuasive essays, how-to (procedural) essays, narratives, and literary responses and provides mini-lessons and tasks to start English teachers well on their way to creating a successful writing program in the classroom.
Teachers in other subjects will find plenty of writing tasks on research, informational reports, biographies, and more to work into their daily curriculum, allowing for both subject exploration and writing mastery.
Fifty-seven writing mini-lessons and more than 200 differentiated workstation tasks, as well as time-saving forms, charts, and rubrics, make this a complete and useful resource for any middle-school classroom.
With The Middle School Writing Toolkit, you can transform your classroom into a successful writer's workshop and students of all abilities can master writing in any genre.
NEW! The Middle School Writing Toolkit is a finalist for the 2008 Next Generation Indie Book Awards!

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Subjects Matter: Every Teacher's Guide to Content-Area Reading Review

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(More customer reviews)Daniels and Zemelman use humor, practical suggestions, and research to get their point across. If you are looking for NCA or NCLB interventions for improving reading in a specific or all content areas, this book has plenty of material! They include examples, book lists, and classroom best practices as well as discussion of the use or non-use of a textbook. These practices are known quantities, research-supported and all have been used by the authors or by those interviewed for this book. Ta-da, it's all in here!

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Finally, a book about content-area reading that's just as useful to math, science, and history teachers as it is to English teachers! Lively, practical, and irreverent, Subjects Matter points the way to activities and materials that energize content and engage students across all subject areas. Harvey Daniels and Steven Zemelman, authors of a dozen influential books on literacy and cofounders of Best Practice High School, bring their trademark style-teacher friendly and kid wise-to the reality of today's middle and high schools.
Their book features:
23 practical classroom activities that help students understand and remember what they read, in mathematics, science, social studies, English, and more
a tough analysis of today's textbooks, along with specific ways to use them more effectively
a new "balanced diet" of reading, including 150 real books of interest to teenage readers
instructions for growing a rich classroom library in your subject area
plans for setting up student book clubs and reading groups in any discipline
group-building techniques that create a productive community of readers
a do-it-yourself exploration of the ways smart readers think
models for developing ambitious thematic units within your classroom or with colleagues
special help and materials for students who struggle
scientific proof that the book's recommended activities do improve reading and learning.
Punctuated by stories from real math, science, social studies, and other classrooms, Subjects Matter shows how young people can read and succeed across the curriculum, and how their teachers can help.

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Giggles in the Middle: Caught'ya Grammar with a Giggle for Middle School (Caught'ya Grammar with a Giggle) (Caught'ya Grammar with a Giggle) Review

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(More customer reviews)I am "testing" this out with my class of gifted fourth-graders, and they love it! They enjoy getting to know a little bit more each day about the kids at Horribly Hard Middle School as well as dream about going to Magic Middle School. What surprised me most was the vocabulary piece. The words are well chosen and well placed. Often I find "challenging" vocabulary to just be wacky- words that we don't hear in our everyday lives. This book, however, keeps the students' interest regarding strong, usable vocabulary. They WANT to look the words up in the dictionary so they have a better understanding of the story, the puns involved, or just to be the one to get to read from the dictionary. We are only on day 16 of the program and I can already see results in the students' own writing.
Teacher's Request to Publisher: Please print a version of this in a binder or spiral format! The little paperback book is a bit hard to hold for reference while writing on the board and teaching the kids (but worth it!). I would pay for it again! :)

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Jane Bell Kiester, author of the popular Caught'ya! Grammar with a Giggle series, has adapted her effective and fun approach to meet the specific learning needs of middle-school students.
Giggles in the Middle gives middle-school teachers the perfect alternative to boring grammar books and dry lectures. With this flexible, proven approach to teaching grammar, usage, and mechanics (GUM) skills and vocabulary, everyone has fun while they learn skills in context.
You'll find: - One continuous story, "The Bizarre Mystery of Horribly Hard Middle School," divided into three parts, each with enough sentences for an entire school year. - Classroom-tested writing assignment suggestions, mini-lessons, and teaching tips. - "Almost midterm" and final exam tests for each grade, with teacher keys. - Easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions. - Complete vocabulary lists for words used in each part of the story. - For easy reference and duplication, a CD with the Grammar, Usage, and Mechanics Guide; the complete, uninterrupted story in narrative form; the midterm and final exam tests; and the Caught'ya sentences.
Use Giggles in the Middle to improve writing and editing skills, raise test scores, engage students in leaning, and create classrooms filled with giggles!

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