JIS English for Academic Purposes

6 traits scoring guide from NWREL

In this activity, students "become" one of the major characters in a book and describe themselves and other characters, using lists of accurate, powerful adjectives. In class discussion, students support their lists with details from the novel.

Resources for educators

Collated lessons for grades 6-8 around the use of the writer's notebook

Empowered Fiction Writers: Generating and Organizing Ideas for Story Writing Overview This three-part lesson introduces students to the use of speedwriting (also called free writing) as a prewriting technique. Learning the technique of speedwriting allows students to generate a foundation of ideas on which they can build a narrative structure. Students then identify key ideas and phrases in their speedwriting, and organize their ideas around the main elements of a story (exposition, rising action, climax, conclusion).

Young Writer's Project

One initial lesson for writer's notebooks is to Read Ralph Fletcher's opening story in Keeping a Writer's Notebook. It's about digging a ditch and catching all kinds of critters. He compares writer's notebooks to that ditch -- a space we dig in our busy lives to catch stuff. After reading the story, my students and I brainstorm the different kinds of things we could catch in our writer's notebooks. Then I typed the chart in a format that made it easy for students to tape it to the inside cover of their notebooks. Here's what we came up with:

The National Writing Project's 30 Ideas for Teaching Writing offers successful strategies contributed by experienced writing project teachers. Since NWP does not promote a single approach to teaching writing, readers will benefit from a variety of eclectic, classroom-tested techniques.

Back to Square One: What To Do When Writing Workshop Just Doesn't Work

Great strategies for finding meaning within reading

Retelling Rubric for Informational Text

Unit 5 (10 weeks) Research Projects (Independent Inquiry based on Nonfiction Matters)

Unit 4 (5 weeks) Nonfiction Writer's Notebooks, Investigations, and Inquiry

Unit 3 (5 weeks) Using Informational Text in Literature Study and Book Clubs