A Quick Guide To Reviving Disengaged Writers 5 8

Middle schoolers can be the masters of disengagement. Recognizing that all students, adept and struggling writers alike, lose steam at times and need a revitalizing jump start, Christopher Lehman offers effective, developmentally-appropriate fixes for addressing situations that frequently sidetrack or distract adolescent writers. Organized as a practical on-the-go teaching reference, the first four chapters offer strategies for counteracting commonplace situations that can regularly spring up and disengage middle school writers such as: writers who seem to have an almost "allergic" reaction to the writing process writers who "cannot possibly find anything to write about" writers who "talk, talk, talk the writing time away" writers who need constant approval before moving on. The final chapter offers an inquiry-based study guide that supports teachers in collaborating on and customizing strategies for reviving the disengaged writers in their learning communities. A Quick Guide to Reviving Disengaged Writers is part of the Workshop Help Desk series. About the Workshop Help Desk series The Workshop Help Desk series is designed for teachers who believe in workshop teaching and who have already rolled up their sleeves enough to have encountered the predictable challenges. If you've struggled to get around quickly enough to help all your students, if you've wondered how to tweak your teaching to make it more effective and lasting, if you've needed to adapt your teaching for English learners, if you've struggled to teach grammar or nonfiction writing or test prep...if you've faced these and other specific, pressing challenges, then this series is for you. Provided in a compact 5" x 7" format, the Workshop Help Desk series offers pocket-sized professional development. For a comprehensive overview of the Units of Study in Opinion/Argument, Information, and Narrative series, including sample minilessons, sample videos, videos, frequently asked questions and more, visit UnitsofStudy.com.

Through an innovative approach of critical ethnography and literacy research via case-study methodologies, Enacting Adolescent Literacies across Communities: Latino/a Scribes and Their Rites analyzes Latino/a adolescents’ engagement with the elements of literacy for English language arts learning and understanding. How young people enact literacies in their bicultural lives and understand literary traditions today reveals their own interests in democracy, equity, and opportunity. Moreover, the rites they perform often recover buried histories, mirrors, and stories similar to the pre-Columbian scribes whose intellectual legacy is relevant in the twenty-first century. R. Joseph Rodríguez illustrates how adolescents experience scribal identities and language pluralism that sustains their cultural knowledge as they make meaning and enact literacies with diverse audiences in civic and schooling communities.

Sit down with Christopher Lehman as he shares the strategies he has used to make research reading and writing real and motivating for students. Chris draws on his experience with the Reading and Writing Project and as co-author of Pathways to the Common Core to help you tailor your instruction to your students' needs, get to the heart of the Common Core State Standards, and, most importantly, challenge your students to become driven, inquisitive thinkers who can meet the demands of school and life in the 21st century.

"Love brings us in close, leads us to study the details of a thing, and asks us to return again and again. These are the motivations and ideas that built this book." -Chris Lehman and Kate Roberts You and your students will fall for close reading. In Falling in Love with Close Reading, Christopher Lehman and Kate Roberts show us that it can be rigorous, meaningful, and joyous. You'll empower students to not only analyze texts but to admire the craft of a beloved book, study favorite songs and videogames, and challenge peers in evidence-based discussions. Chris and Kate start with a powerful three-step close-reading ritual that students can apply to any text. Then they lay out practical, engaging lessons that not only guide students to independence in reading texts closely but also help them transfer this critical, analytical skill to media and even the lives they lead. Responsive to students' needs and field-tested in classrooms, these lessons include: strategies for close reading narratives, informational texts, and arguments suggestions for differentiation sample charts and student work from real classrooms connections to the Common Core State Standards a focus on viewing media and life in this same careful way. "We see the ritual of close reading not just as a method of doing the academic work of looking closely at text-evidence, word choice, and structure," write Chris and Kate, "but as an opportunity to bring those practices together to empower our students to see the subtle messages in texts and in their lives." Read Falling in Love with Close Reading and discover that the benefits and joy of close reading don't have to stop at the edge of the page. Read a sample from the book to learn more about Chris and Kate's close-reading ritual for students and for an annotated text that shows how it works.

"This book is for teachers who are getting started using a workshop approach to reading or writing, or both, and who have one or both of the Units of Study in Reading, and Units of Study in Writing"--

Lucy Calkins and her colleagues at the Reading and Writing Project have helped thousands of educators design their own pathways to the Common Core. Now, with Pathways to the Common Core, they are ready to help you find your way. Designed for teachers, school leaders, and professional learning communities looking to navigate the gap between their current literacy practices and the ideals of the Common Core, Pathways to the Common Core will help you: understand what the standards say, suggest, and what they don't say; recognize the guiding principles that underpin the reading and writing standards; identify how the Common Core's infrastructure supports a spiraling K-12 literacy curriculum; and scrutinize the context in which the CCSS were written and are being unrolled. In addition to offering an analytical study of the standards, this guide will also help you and your colleagues implement the standards in ways that lift the level of teaching and learning throughout your school.--

Supporting dreams of fabulous escape and transformation, fantasy literature can be especially compelling for adolescents. Mary Ehrenworth offers a unit of study that harnesses the power of this expansive and poignant genre to lure even reluctant readers into reading epic novels with passion and stamina. Adhering to reading workshop principles and the classic session architecture honed by Lucy Calkins in the Units of Study series, this unit of study begins by launching the kids into fantasy book clubs that foster literary conversations. After exploring ways to read with deep comprehension and to synthesize across pages, students learn to develop thematic understandings. During the course of this unit, students likewise explore where their novels fit within the larger literary tradition. Throughout the unit, students read several books-tackling at least one series, and sometimes moving across series. (This unit of study is drawn from Constructing Curriculum in the Units of Study for Teaching Reading series.) A Quick Guide to Teaching Reading Through Fantasy Novels is part of the Workshop Help Desk series. About the Workshop Help Desk series The Workshop Help Desk series is designed for teachers who believe in workshop teaching and who have already rolled up their sleeves enough to have encountered the predictable challenges. If you've struggled to get around quickly enough to help all your students, if you've wondered how to tweak your teaching to make it more effective and lasting, if you've needed to adapt your teaching for English learners, if you've struggled to teach grammar or nonfiction writing or test prep...if you've faced these and other specific, pressing challenges, then this series is for you. Provided in a compact 5" x 7" format, the Workshop Help Desk series offers pocket-sized professional development. For a comprehensive overview of the Units of Study in Opinion/Argument, Information, and Narrative series, including sample minilessons, sample videos, videos, frequently asked questions and more, visit UnitsofStudy.com.