Improving Students' Writing, K-8: From Meaning-Making to High Stakes!

No longer the forgotten R, writing is receiving more and more attention. Constructed response writing is increasingly used as a more authentic form of test item to assess content understanding. Mathematics and science standards require writing to demonstrate and communicate understanding. Writing is seen as one of the strongest predictors of success in college and will become a requirement on SATs. This book offers teachers loads of examples of how to engage children and improve their performance in all types of content and creative writing, from self-selected topics, to limited-selection topics, to focused-topic writing and constructed response to test items. Using student samples, the authors offer various suggestions for identifying how individual students can be guided to improvement. The book will show teachers how to give students skills to collect and structure ideas and information, craft these into words, sentences and paragraphs, and present it all in a way to match what they hope their readers will understand. Special emphasis is placed on helping students write informational text as a way to demonstrate their understanding and process and work toward their own new understanding of information. Essential for teachers in our current testing environment, this book offers steps and tools to strengthen students' facility with the much-assessed six traits of writing and help students achieve on high stakes assessments. Real student writing samples and classroom conversations make it easy for teachers to transfer tools, strategies and practices to their own classrooms.