The Middle School Writing Toolkit: Differentiated Instruction across the Content Areas

by Tim Clifford

Overview

Designed specifically for all middle-school teachers, The Middle School Writing Toolkit has everything needed to get your writer's workshop up and running—whether you're a language arts teacher looking for new writing workshop ideas or a subject-area teacher who wants to improve the quality of student papers. The Middle School Writing Toolkit addresses the five major writing genres that middle-school students are expected to master—reports, persuasive essays, how-to (procedural) essays, narratives, and literary responses—and provides mini-lessons and tasks to start English teachers well on their way to creating a successful writing program in the classroom. Teachers in other subjects will find plenty of writing tasks on research, informational reports, biographies, and more to work into their daily curriculum, allowing for both subject exploration and writing mastery. Fifty-seven writing mini-lessons and more than 200 differentiated workstation tasks, as well as time-saving forms, charts, and rubrics, make this a complete and useful resource for any middle-school classroom. With The Middle School Writing Toolkit, you can transform your classroom into a successful writer's workshop and students of all abilities can master writing in any genre.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780929895758
Publisher:	Capstone
Publication date:	01/01/2013
Series:	Maupin House
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	8.50(w) x 11.00(h) x 0.44(d)
Age Range:	11 - 13 Years

Editorial Reviews

Tim Clifford, a middle school language arts teacher in New York, brings to market a teacher's guide to organizing the writing classroom with The Middle School Writing Toolkit: Differentiated Instruction Across the Content Areas. The ten chapters are divided into three sections. The first three chapters address the unique challenges of middle school writers, as they adjust to working with as many as eight different teachers, all with their own curriculum and style of delivery. Teachers too face the challenge of meeting the needs of peer-driven students with widely varying writing competencies. Clifford's middle school experience prepares him well for setting up any classroom as a writers' workshop. The next five chapters differentiate instruction by targeting skill development across content areas. The last two chapters model skill lessons, workstation tasks, and a variety of composing techniques with revision strategies. Well-designed rubrics follow workstation lessons and provide both assessment and instruction, as they can be helpful tools in revision. In a final section entitled Teaching Resources," Clifford includes a variety of assessment and record-keeping worksheets to monitor both individual and class progress. The toolkit sorts the conventions of writing across content areas into genre and content specific lessons. The lessons are easy to follow, designed as single pages, and address a range of exposition including reports, persuasive essays, and responses to reading. The focus on expository writing instruction supports the middle school curriculum where students are learning to write for a variety of purposes and audiences. Clifford's methodical approach to skill-based writing instruction gives teachers a way to organize their classrooms for writers' workshop. The workstation and mini-lessons provide practice for adolescent writers experimenting with genre. Taken together, the lessons remind us of the complexity of choices available to writers. Teaching writing is as much about what to say as what not to say. Models included in the text offer techniques such as interesting facts, quotations, and anecdotes to demonstrate writing strategies for students. The teacher guides for instruction include specific tasks with suggestions for where the lesson best fits a curriculum, along with time saving guidelines for assessing each task. If students have opportunities across content classes to write, revise, and practice when and how to use Clifford's tools, writing proficiency has a chance to develop over time.Teachers will find this a useful resource, especially teachers outside language arts, challenged by organizing writing instruction in their classrooms. While the target audience for the toolkit is middle school content teachers, the workshop design assists teachers at any grade level interested in getting more writing and writing to learn strategies into their curriculum. The tools are here to begin and sustain writing instruction in any classroom, as all teachers become teachers of writing." -Reviewed by Roberta J. Herter, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Education, Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, CA, for Education Book Reviews

Education Book Reviews