Synopses & Reviews
Knowing that you must balance your focus in the classroom on the process that children use as they write and the quality of their compositions, Teaching Writing continues to provide a comprehensive look at both process and product. This new edition provides you with practical strategies for teaching and assessing writing, with a focus on individual student needs and teacher accountability. Additional features will help you recognize the concerns of struggling writers, the needs of English learners, and the strategies you can use to improve student test taking.
Addressing Process and Product
- Vignettes beginning each chapter present you with an intimate look at real classroom teachers and their teaching of writing.
- Minilessons model five basic steps for teaching essential strategies and skills to young writers.
- Step by Step features offer detailed guidance for planning instruction and assessment, organizing learning, and managing classroom writing projects.
- The free CD-ROM Writing Workshop gives you specific insight into classroom teaching in a workshop model, illustrating both the writing process and product.
Meeting Individual Student Needs
- How to Address Struggling Writers’ Problems This step by step analysis explains what issues cause writers to struggle, provides clear examples of the problem, and clarifies the steps to take to help writers overcome their obstacles.
- Scaffolding English Learners features pinpoint ways to support student writers whose first language is not English.
Planning for Accountability
- Preparing for Writing Tests This new feature will help you prepare students for high-stakes testing by clearly defining each type of writing, providing prompts to generate a writing sample, and outlining possible pitfalls writers may face when writing in this specific genre.
- Rubrics throughout chapters help you address and clarify assessment issues.
- Instructional Previews identify goals that help you plan for teaching by addressing the question of what to teach and when.
Synopsis
Accessible and reader-friendly, this is the definitive book on teaching writing to children in grades K-8, the only title on the market to thoroughly address both the process and the product of writing.
Covers strategies for teaching prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing through writing workshops, literature focus units, and thematic units; techniques for helping children develop ideas, organize writing, choose vocabulary, apply stylistic devices, and correct mechanical errors; and, five levels of scaffolded composition instruction: modeled, shared, interactive, guided, and independent writing.
Addressing Process and Product
NEW! A Writing Workshop CD now included in every copy of the book gives you specific insight into classroom teaching in a workshop model, illustrating both the writing process and product.
Meeting Individual Student Needs
NEW! How to Address Struggling Writers’ Problems-- this step by step analysis explains what issues cause writers to struggle, provides clear examples of the problem, and clarifies the steps to take to help writers overcome their obstacles.
Planning for Accountability
NEW! Preparing for Writing Tests --this new feature will help you prepare students for high-stakes testing by clearly defining each type of writing, providing prompts to generate a writing sample, and outlining possible pitfalls writers may face when writing in this specific genre.
About the Author
Gail E. Tompkins is Professor Emerita at California State Unversity, Fresno, and she continues to direct the San Joaquin Valley Writing Project. She regularly works with teachers in their kindergarten through eighth-grade classrooms and leads staff development programs on reading, language arts, and writing. In 1998 Dr. Tompkins was inducted into the California Reading Association's Reading Hall of Fame in recognition of her publication and other accomplishments in the field of reading, and recently she was awarded the prestigious Provost's Award for Excellence in Teaching at California's State University, Fresno.
Table of Contents
PART I Process and Product
Chapter 1 Teaching Children to Write
Chapter 2 Writing Workshop
Chapter 3 Writing Strategies and Skills
Chapter 4 Assessing Children's Writing
PART II Writing Genres
Chapter 5 Journal Writing
Chapter 6 Letter Writing
Chapter 7 Biographical Writing
Chapter 8 Expository Writing
Chapter 9 Narrative Writing
Chapter 10 Descriptive Writing
Chapter 11 Poetry Writing
Chapter 12 Persuasive Writing