What does great writing instruction look like and sound like?
How do successful teachers of writing get great writers who enjoy writing?
Where do they find the time for instruction, assessment, and test prep?

In Writing Essentials Regie Routman demystifies the process of teaching writing well and gives you the knowledge, research, precise instructional language, and confidence you need to succeed. With Regie's help, you'll transform your classroom into an organized, joyful writing environment where students connect reading with writing every day across the curriculum, learn essential skills like grammar and spelling, and achieve higher scores on high-stakes tests through sensible, writing-based test preparation and daily classroom-based assessment.

Writing Essentials specifically and explicitly demonstrates practical, easy-to-do strategies that turn your writing instruction practices into best practices. Follow Routman's path for successfully leading all students-including English language learners, writers who struggle, and students coping with learning disabilities-from first draft to publication. You'll find expert advice and specific demonstrations on a wide variety of techniques, including:

• demonstrating your own writing process for students
• organizing and managing the writing classroom
• conducting effective, efficient writing conferences
• creating meaningful rubrics for better assessment
• teaching various forms of narrative and informational writing-and poetry
• applying shared writing across the grades and across the curriculum
• teaching editing and revision
• mapping out your writing instruction with Regie's own flexible, five-day lesson-planning model.

In addition, Writing Essentials includes a DVD with eight three-to-four-minute video clips from primary and intermediate classrooms that show Regie conferring with writers and celebrating their work as she teaches and assesses. These invaluable clips, and the detailed notes that accompany them, take you inside the writing conference to see its structures and procedures while the sample classroom publications also on the DVD reveal the exciting possibilities of working with student writers.

Writing Essentials is conversational, upbeat, practical, eminently readable, illustrated with a wealth of children's writing, and filled with proven techniques for teaching writing well and managing your instructional time more effectively. With Routman in hand, you'll not only have the inspiration to say "I can do that too," but you'll have first-rate resources and strategies to answer your questions and help make great writing instruction happen in your classroom immediately.

For more information on using the DVD, please click here....

 

• setting lessons and activities in a meaningful context
• using an Optimal Learning Model to organize teaching and gradually release responsibility to students
• demonstrating reading, writing, and thinking for students so they have explicit models to follow
• articulating high expectations for every student, including ELLs and struggling learners, and ensuring that they meet them
• embedding assessment into all aspects of instruction and planning
• employing the reading-writing connection to improve comprehension
• motivating writers by always writing for real audiences and purposes
• implementing a schoolwide coaching model for higher achievement and a more fulfilling collaboration with colleagues.

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In this long-awaited volume, Regie Routman continues the discussion she began in the best-selling Invitations and further explores the full universe of an effective language arts and literacy program across the curriculum....

With this remarkably complete and well-organized resource, Regie Routman invites all teachers to reflect upon their practice, and in doing so, she makes whole language teaching and learning possible for everyone....

In this easy-to-read and research-based text, Regie Routman provides clarity, support, specific demonstrations, and confidence to teachers so they can teach reading well and get high test scores too - regardless of the reading program they use. Detailed lessons, immediately doable ideas, teaching tips, and lots of practical suggestions make this an essential text for excellent and enjoyable teaching and learning....

Teaching Third and Fourth Graders to Love Writing Poetry
Just for Third & Fourth Grades!
Renowned teacher Regie Routman shares her poetry-teaching strategies and a delightful selection of poems written by third-and fourth graders. Regie provides easy, wonderful lessons on using students' poems—and other poems—as models to invite children to write free-verse poems about things they know and care about, from bossy sisters to the simple pleasure of eating french fries! Includes strategies for writing poems about social studies and science topics. Includes 20 reproducible poems by third and fourth graders, show in handwritten draft and final published form to share with kids. With this approach, ever student feels successful as a writer....

Teaching First Graders to Love Writing Poetry
Just for First Grade!
Renowned teacher Regie Routman shares her poetry-teaching strategies and a delightful selection of poems written by first graders. Regie provides easy, wonderful lessons on using students' poems—and other poems—as models to invite children to write free-verse poems about things they know and care about: skating, best friends, pet dogs, and more. She describes the way she invites children to study the model poem, beginning by asking kids, What do you notice? Includes 20 reproducible poems by first graders, show in handwritten draft and final published form to share with kids. With this approach, ever child is successful as a writer....