Discover a balanced approach to writing workshops in grades 3–9. The book's unique, hands-on activities are carefully designed to help students write with a concrete purpose and audience in mind, and complete assignments that are more focused and authentic. Organized around six writing genres — personal memoir, fictional narrative, informational report, opinion piece, procedural writing, and poetry — more than 50 mini-lessons deal with specific skills that will help students write effective fiction and nonfiction. To become fully and functionally literate, students must be exposed to a wide variety of texts. Give your students the skills they need to become more confident, successful writers.
This is a fantastic and practical book with lots of suggestions for both beginning and experienced teachers. The segmenting into genre helps lay the groundwork for teaching a quality writing program but doesn't limit in the way some other books on genre have.
This was a great book for elementary school teachers and, though I'm not that audience, I actually appreciated how it broke down the writing process into steps, suggested how you might use rubrics for assessment, and provided several examples of how a variety of genres might be taught in the context of classroom activities and assignments. In terms of adapting these activities for older writers, I think there was some great stuff in the personal memoir section that could help students work on personal statements/essays for applications. I also think that the rubrics are largely adaptable for older writers.