Kristin Cashore is one of those rare authors whose books are deep and beautiful, and whose work helps readers gain perspective on their own lives. Tune in to hear about Kristin's process of writing Bitterblue, how music helps her with writing, and how she copes when writing gets hard.
Power Notes
This printout teaches students a method for organizing their thoughts that involves assigning "powers" to different ideas. This outlining technique helps students differentiate between main ideas and supporting details.
Haiku Starter
This graphic organizer provides students the opportunity to brainstorm words about a given topic, count and record the syllables, and draft a haiku.
RAFT Writing Template
Students can utilize this printout to organize their writing as they learn to use the RAFT strategy. This printout enables students to clearly define their role, audience, format, and topic for writing.
Essay Rubric
This rubric delineates specific expectations about an essay assignment to students and provides a means of assessing completed student essays.
Essay Map
Use this graphic organizer to develop an outline for an essay that includes an introductory statement, main ideas, supporting details, and a conclusion.
Write Alouds
This strategy guide explains how to use write-aloud (also known as modeled writing) to teach effective writing strategies and improve students' independent writing ability.
Shared Writing
This strategy guide explains how to use shared writing to teach students effective strategies that will improve their own independent writing ability.
Using the RAFT Writing Strategy
This strategy guide introduces the RAFT technique and offers practical ideas for using this technique to teach students to experiment with various perspectives in their writing.
Supporting Student Comprehension in Content Area Reading
In this strategy guide, you'll learn a few simple, yet powerful, techniques to encourage students to use peer talk and writing to enhance their understanding of content area texts.
Facilitating Participation with Silent Conversations
This guide introduces silent conversations, a collaborative learning technique that has students
thinking, sharing, and reflecting about important questions—but through writing rather than talk.
The Art of the Doodle: Writing with Imagination
Use independent, imaginative artwork and varied writing prompts to assess understanding of a given topic for a student body with differentiated needs.
Developing Evidence-Based Arguments from Texts
This strategy guide clarifies the difference between persuasion and argumentation, stressing the connection between close reading of text to gather evidence and formation of a strong argumentative claim about text.
Inquiry Charts (I-Charts)
This guide introduces I-Charts, a strategy that enables students to generate meaningful questions about a topic and organize their writing.
Power Notes
The strategy examined in this Strategy Guide teaches students an outlining technique to help them differentiate between main ideas and details in their reading and writing.
Professional Knowledge for the Teaching of Writing
With full recognition that writing is an increasingly multifaceted activity, we offer several principles that should guide effective teaching practice.
The Writing Workshop: Working through the Hard Parts (And They're All Hard Parts)
A practical, comprehensive, and illuminating guide for both new and experienced teachers that confronts the challenges of the writing workshop head-on.
Swish! Pow! Whack! Teaching Onomatopoeia Through Sports Poetry
Students explore poetry about sports, looking closely at the use of onomatopoeia. After viewing a segment of a sporting event, students create their own onomatopoeic sports poems.
Color of Silence: Sensory Imagery in Pat Mora's Poem "Echoes"
Pat Mora's poem "Echoes" demonstrates that our senses are powerful tools for literary analysis and comprehension as students use their senses to discover new ways to read and write.
Exploring Change through Allegory and Poetry
Students read an example of allegory, review literary concepts, complete literary elements maps and plot diagrams, create a pictorial allegory, and write diamante poems related to the theme of change.