Writing Essentials: Raising Expectations and Results While Simplifying Teaching (with DVD)

Grades K-8

What does excellent writing instruction look like and sound like?

How do successful teachers get great writers who enjoy writing?

Where do teachers 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 writingand poetry
• applying shared writing across the grades and across the curriculum
• teaching editing and revision.

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.

Also available by Regie Routman:

Reading Essentials / 0325004927 / 2002 / 288 pp.

Conversations / 032500109X / 2000 / 896 pp.