This book has an easy-to-follow-format. It supports teachers through six workshops by sharing specific strategies, procedures, and materials that worked best for students and teachers in classroom writing workshops. The book discusses the routines that helped organize and support a workshop; and presents strategies for anecdotal record-keeping,…

Describes how an elementary teacher developed a daily writer's workshop. Suggestions for finding time to write include reducing use of workbooks and skillsheets, looking for redundancy in curriculum programs, concentrating on writing for a shortened period of the school year, and creating time-saving instructional strategies. (SM)

Describes how elementary teachers can set up meaningful guidelines to enhance the productivity of writing workshops. Writing workshops accommodate the idiosyncratic nature of individual writing and learning processes. They provide a highly structured environment with clear rules and procedures. The article explains how to establish classroom…

A teacher-researcher provides ideas for creating a writer's workshop and encouraging written expression. Suggestions include letting the children create the room arrangement, providing a variety of writing tools, establishing a predictable writing time, becoming partners with students in the writing process, and encouraging students to be active…

Presents writing warm-up activities to help elementary students develop and polish their language skills. The warm-up activities focus on detail, descriptive dialog, memory writing, titles, punctuation, and vocabulary enhancement. The activities provide choices, present important ideas, and foster collaboration, responsibility, and trial and error…

Bringing together information elementary school teachers need to make balanced literacy instruction a reality, this book presents more than 90 short articles designed to be read in a brief period of time and suitable for use in after-school workshops. It presents ideas and instructional approaches teachers have found most valuable and effective in…

Presents guidelines used by a first-grade teacher to teach students to write fictional stories based on things they know and using children's literature as models. Describes the benefits of writing workshops and outlines a method for teaching techniques that professional writers use. (SM)

Article presents suggestions for motivating elementary students to learn by combining science and writing. The strategies include planning the right environment; teaching the scientific method; establishing a link to literature; and making time for students to observe, experiment, and write. (SM)

Cites results of studies showing that students' language skills are not deteriorating. Suggests using class time for writing workshops to give students feedback on work-in-progress. Considers that difficulty with concepts and subject content may come across as poor writing. Notes that additional writing can be helpful without being graded. (DK)

This video is one of a four-part series which is designed to introduce teachers and parents to standards and teaching in a standards-based environment, and aims to help teachers and parents understand how teaching with standards can change classrooms, work assignments, and student performance. This video focuses on classrooms where the teachers…

This compilation presents materials associated with the 5-week summer session of the Samford University Writing Project, 1991. The compilation begins with curriculum vitae of staff, teacher consultants, and guest speakers. The compilation also presents lists of group and committee members and daily logs written in by participants in a wide variety…

Providing personal yet professional guidelines for introducing students to the life of a writer, this book provides a rationale, a set of principles, and some possible methods for using small groups in writing workshops. The book discusses how small groups can provide growing writers with the four essentials which all writers need: time for…

Drawing on stories from classrooms, examples of student writing, and illustrations, this book explains in practical terms the theoretical underpinnings of how elementary school students learn to write from their reading. Beginning with the concepts that underlie how writing teachers teach students to write by studying other writers, it goes on to…

This compilation presents materials associated with the 5-week summer session of the Samford University Writing Project, 1992. The compilation begins with curriculum vitae of staff, teacher consultants, and guest speakers. The compilation also presents lists of group and committee members and daily logs written in by participants in a wide variety…

The first edition of this book in 1987 examined how teachers teach and how learners learn in the context of reading and writing workshops for middle school students. This revised edition still stresses the workshop approach to writing and English instruction, but it calls for a more activist approach by the teacher, encouraging more direction and…