This book offers 101 lessons on easy to access 2-page spreads. On the right are the step-by-step directions for teaching, plus where indicated "dialogue boxes" that model the out loud conversations that students will have with themselves, their peers, or their teachers, that are a key component of this method. It also features a companion website for further information and resources. Using these lessons, students will gain autonomy with grammar as they learn the conversations they can have with themselves to make the right grammar or usage choice. This book: Features easy-to-use lessons and format Is user-friendly with multiple handouts in the appendices and on the companion website

Poetry is a joyful art form, but how do you teach students to joyfully read, analyze, and write poems? In Text Structures from Poetry, Grades 4-12, award-winning educator Gretchen Bernabei teams up with noted poet Laura Van Prooyen to light the path. Centered around 50 classroom-proven lesson and poem pairs, the mentor texts represent a broad range of voices in contemporary poetry and the canon. These unique and engaging lessons show educators how to "pop the hood" on a poem to discover what makes it work, using text structures to unlock the engine of a poem. This method enables educators to engage students in reading and re-reading a poem closely, to identify how the parts of the poem relate to each other to create movement, and to leverage what they have learned to write their own evocative poems. Each of the 50 lessons includes a mentor poem that serves as an excellent model for young writers, a diagram that illustrates the text structure of the poem, and several inspiring examples of student poems written to emulate the mentor poem. Easy-to-use instructional resources enhance instructor and student understanding and include: Teaching notes for unlocking the text structure of a poem and the engine that makes it work. Tips for exploring rhyme scheme, meter, and fixed forms. Instructional sequences that vary the ways students can read and write poems and other prose forms. Ideas for revising and publishing student poems. A "Meet the Contemporary Authors" section that includes fascinating messages from the contemporary poets. Teach your students to learn about poetry using the magic of poems themselves and lead the way to a rewarding love of poetry for teachers and students alike.

Sometimes a student's best teacher is another student Just as the pressure for students to perform well on state assessments escalates ever higher, and the call to raise students' achievement in narrative, opinion/argument, and informative/explanatory writing grows louder, Gretchen Bernabei and Judi Reimer publish Fun-Size Academic Writing for Serious Learning. If ever there were a book to answer every need, this is it. You see, Gretchen and Judi have been concerned about adolescents' writing for years, and they have had amazing success using mentor texts by students to teach the ins and outs of writing in any genre. So with this book, they "hand over their file drawers" and provide you with 101 essays written by students with one-page companion lessons that address text structure, imagery, dialogue, rhetorical devices, grammatical structures, textual blends--all the different tools that writers use. Organized into three major sections that align with the Common Core, STAAR, and other major state assessments, Fun- Size Academic Writing delivers succinct, powerhouse instruction on topics such as: How to choose a structure for argument, informational, or narrative writing How to read a piece and extract thesis statement and main points How to layer a wide range of details to support points How to use rhetorical devices and grammatical constructions for effect How to write from the point of view of a fictional character The essays-also available in reproducible form on the companion website--demonstrate something striking, something imitable, something concrete. They give students a bank of choices to call upon as they write. The lessons are short, practical, and full of variety. Collectively, these essays and lessons have the potential to move the needle on American students' writing achievement once and for all. They show what has been done by students-and they reveal to you how your own students can do it, too.

State tests are assessing reading and writing together-Are you ready? I wish students would interact with a text on their own...I wish it wasn't like pulling teeth to get them to elaborate their thinking. Wish no more, because bestselling author Gretchen Bernabei shows you how to guide students to be nimble at both short answer and extended responses. Her secret? "Teach students text structures, and they can pour their swirling ideas about the text into cogent writing." Using the accessible format of fables, Bernabei and Hover share lessons and an appendix full of fables so you can teach students five concrete ways to respond to text in any genre: Generate basic responses, using structures that support clarity Craft fiction inspired by the text to unveil literary knowledge and imaginative response Write essays about a theme or moral that display empathic and evidence-based interpretation Answer open-ended questions by selecting a technique that reflects the text and their engagement Use non-traditional formats like graphics and spoken dialogue to showcase their learning The heat is on-beginning in third grade, state tests are now assessing reading and writing together. And that's a good thing, but we've got some catching up to do. With Text Structures and Fables in hand, your students will swiftly and surely become text-savvy readers and writers.

By examining the structure of mentor texts, students learn how to use the text structure of each document to create their own essays. The techniques are simple to use and effective, enabling even struggling readers with the tools to understand the methods the writer is using.

It's one of education's greatest challenges: How do we shape our youngest students, who often are just learning how to hold a pencil, into capable writers within the span of a single school year? Text Structures from Nursery Rhymes offers the solution: a clear and actionable framework for guiding young students to write successfully in any style, from narrative to descriptive to persuasive.