Written by award winning, critically acclaimed author, Gloria Houston, this long-awaited text uses a totally new concept in teaching writing by focusing on learning to write in the real world, not the world of literary writing, using content materials from the entire curriculum. Groundbreaking in the teaching of writing, this text provides instruction in the use of visual organizers to understand how each piece of writing works, supporting its effectiveness with research data and theory from a wide array of fields.
Gloria Houston was a teacher and a native of the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. Ms. Houston taught students of all ages. Ms. Houston wrote several books for children, including the best-selling My Great-Aunt Arizona, illustrated by Susan Condie Lamb; The Year of the Perfect Christmas Tree, illustrated by Barbara Cooney; and LittleJim. She lived in Asheville, North Carolina.
I particularly like this graphic-organizer way of approaching writing tasks. Several real-world expository type writing structures are laid out for students who might not just invent their own organizational structures or intuit them from reading numerous examples. Even kids who could easily infer the structures may be too busy to read the number of samples they would need to.