To say I was kind of excited when I heard she was releasing The Writing Strategies Book would be the understatement of the year. It was a no brainer to select it for this month's professional read.
The Writing Strategies Book is subtitled "Your Everything Guide to Developing Skilled Writers." And she is not joking. Just like the first book, this book is jammed packed with right this minute strategies to use with your kiddos.
The first 30-ish pages give you an overview of the book-how it's organized, how to set goals with students, and how you might use the book alongside a variety of writing instruction approaches. After that, there are 300+ pages of one pages strategy instruction ideas that could be used with students individually, in small groups, or in whole class lessons.
Take a peek at The Writing Strategies Book:
•Composing with Pictures
•Engagement
•Generating Ideas
•Focus
•Organizational Structure
•Elaboration
•Word Choice
•Conventions: Spelling
•Conventions: Grammar and Punctuaion
•Partnerships and Clubs
Here's a breakdown of each section:
Brief 2 -4 page overview of the goal
One page overview for each of the over 300 strategies
With 38 strategies, the Generating Ideas chapter is amazing. While you may have writers that can write a focused and structured piece, if they can't generate a topic to write about, they're doomed.
The greatest strength of this book for me is as a tool to help me lift writers' practice vs. pieces. I'm really good about giving advice to help a student improve a specific piece, but it's more important to phrase it in a way that students can apply to any piece of writing vs. the piece they're currently on.
Here's an example from the book:
Lifting a Piece:
"Writing about your dog is a great topic! Can you think of specific memories that you have? Like the day you got him or a time you took him on a walk?
This talk will help your writer get through a piece, but unless he/she is only going to write about the dog, this advice won't transfer to other work.
Lifting practice:
I'm so glad you have a topic. Now think about specific memories connected to your topic.
Lifting practice is hard! This book is an incredible resource to help your conferences move away from fix a piece to lifting writing practices.
The Writing Strategies Book is subtitled "Your Everything Guide to Developing Skilled Writers." And she is not joking. Just like the first book, this book is jammed packed with right this minute strategies to use with your kiddos.
The first 30-ish pages give you an overview of the book-how it's organized, how to set goals with students, and how you might use the book alongside a variety of writing instruction approaches. After that, there are 300+ pages of one pages strategy instruction ideas that could be used with students individually, in small groups, or in whole class lessons.
Take a peek at The Writing Strategies Book:
•Composing with Pictures
•Engagement
•Generating Ideas
•Focus
•Organizational Structure
•Elaboration
•Word Choice
•Conventions: Spelling
•Conventions: Grammar and Punctuaion
•Partnerships and Clubs
Here's a breakdown of each section:
Brief 2 -4 page overview of the goal
One page overview for each of the over 300 strategies
With 38 strategies, the Generating Ideas chapter is amazing. While you may have writers that can write a focused and structured piece, if they can't generate a topic to write about, they're doomed.
The greatest strength of this book for me is as a tool to help me lift writers' practice vs. pieces. I'm really good about giving advice to help a student improve a specific piece, but it's more important to phrase it in a way that students can apply to any piece of writing vs. the piece they're currently on.
Here's an example from the book:
Lifting a Piece:
"Writing about your dog is a great topic! Can you think of specific memories that you have? Like the day you got him or a time you took him on a walk?
This talk will help your writer get through a piece, but unless he/she is only going to write about the dog, this advice won't transfer to other work.
Lifting practice:
I'm so glad you have a topic. Now think about specific memories connected to your topic.
Lifting practice is hard! This book is an incredible resource to help your conferences move away from fix a piece to lifting writing practices.
Here are few quotes I love from The Writing Strategies Book:
Are you a The Reading Strategies Book fan? Do you plan on adding The Writing Strategies Book to your collection? I hope you'll love it as much as I do!
Want more on professional reads? Catch up here: