Building Young Writers

As the world comes to grips with what it means to be literate in the twenty-first century, Understanding and Supporting Young Writers from Birth to 8 provides practitioners with the skills and knowledge they need to support young children effectively as they learn to write. Interweaving theory and research with everyday practice, the book offers guidance on all aspects of writing, from creating multimodal texts and building children’s vocabulary, to providing support for children who find writing particularly challenging. With appropriate strategies to develop young children’s writing from an early age included throughout, the book discusses the role of oral language in early writing in detail and explores the key relationships between ‘drawing and talking’, ‘drawing and writing’ and ‘drawing, talking and writing’. Each chapter also features samples of writing and drawing to illustrate key points, as well as reflective questions to help the reader apply ideas in their own settings. Further topics covered include: progressions in children’s writing writing in the pre-school years developing authorial skills developing editorial skills teaching writing to EAL learners. Understanding and Supporting Young Writers from Birth to 8 is a unique resource that will help early childhood educators, early years school teachers, specialist practitioners working with very young children, and students enrolled in Early Childhood or Primary Studies courses to boost their confidence in teaching young learners as they become writers.

In Make Writing, everyone's favorite education blogger and writing coach, Angela Stockman, turns teaching strategies and practice upside down. She spills you out of your chair, shreds your lined paper, and launches you and your writer's workshop into the maker space! Who even knew this was possible?

"Julie Hartley's debut poetry collection captures the lived experience of a life in motion, moving in rhythmic language from a childhood in England through restless travels around the globe. Hartley is a poet who can say, "You'll never know if there are others / picking your route through this dark." Whether meandering through Greece, Peru, Canada or China, or navigating the experience of motherhood and cultural differences, Deboning a Dragon attests to the probability that shared experience is a bridge to span otherness. Hartley is a passionate observer whose poems explore the transformational power of movement--and staying still."--

This long-awaited book offers the most comprehensive exploration of Spandel's effective 6-trait approach to writing for K-3 teachers. The perfect complement to its phenomenally successful parent text, Creating Writers, Fourth Edition, this new book provides clear guidelines on helping young students draft, self-assess, and revise their writing, as well as explicit criteria to show students precisely what they must do to succeed as writers in virtually any situation--including state tests. In practical and teacher-friendly terms, acclaimed author Vicki Spandel explains six-trait writing from the inside out, in terms teachers and their students can understand, and offers hands-on links to writing process and to reading, showing that for beginning students, hearing the traits in literature can be as important as expressing them through personally generated text. The text is designed to give practicing and new teachers a more in-depth understanding of the writing process and how it connects to the six traits, while encouraging them to continuously write with students and model their own personal writing process. for use in the K-3 classroom or as part of a study group. Reviewers consistently call it a powerful resource for primary teachers, but many teachers of older students have found it invaluable, as well, because it simplifies writing, giving struggling students of any age ready access to what has felt formidable and difficult.

From the very first chapter of this informative and inspiring book, a clear picture emerges of how even three- and four-year-olds' capacities for serious authorship can and should be supported. - Lillian G. Katz Coauthor of Young Investigators: The Project Approach in the Early Years By the time they reach preschool or kindergarten, young children are already writers. They don't have much experience, but they're filled with stories to tell and ideas to express - they want to show the world what they know and see. All they need is a nurturing teacher like you to recognize the writer at work within them. All you need to help them is Already Ready. Taking an exciting, new approach to working with our youngest students, Already Ready shows you how, by respecting children as writers, engaged in bookmaking, you can gently nudge them toward a lifetime of joyful writing. Katie Wood Ray and Matt Glover guide you through fundamental concepts of early writing. Providing numerous, helpful examples of early writing - complete with transcriptions - they demonstrate how to: make sense of children's writing and interpret how they represent sounds, ideas, and images see important developmental signs in writers that you can use to help them grow further recognize the thinking young children engage in and discover that it's the same thinking more experienced writers use to craft purposeful, thoughtful pieces. Then Ray and Glover show you how little ones can develop powerful understandings about: texts and their characteristics the writing process what it means to be a writer. You'll learn how to support your writers' quest to make meaning, as they grow their abilities and refine their thinking about writing through teaching strategies such as: reading aloud working side by side with writers sharing children's writing. Writing is just one part of a busy early childhood classroom, but even in little doses, a nurturing approach can work wonders and help children connect the natural writer inside them to a life of expressing themselves on paper. Find that approach, share it with your students, and you'll discover that you don't have to get students ready to write - they're Already Ready.