Living Between the Lines

By Lucy McCormick Calkins and Lucy Calkins

Book Overview

Living Between the Lines is a heartening invitation to bring new life into reading-writing workshops. Calkins has woven insights, practical suggestions, references, and anecdotes into this inspirational story of a community of educators who have pushed back the frontiers of what we know about teaching writing and reading. Personal in approach and comprehensive in presentation, this book includes: 08538 the story of how writers' notebooks and a new attention to rehearsal have led to important revisions in many writing workshops major chapters on establishing courses of study in which children read and write memoir, nonfiction, and picturebooks a new look at the qualities of good writing and ways we can help children grow into them references to the best of children's literature and to ways these books can enrich our classrooms an invitation to pioneer new ideas about conferring, record keeping, mini-lessons, and organizational structures for the workshop.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0772518165
• ISBN13: 9780772518163
• Release Date: January 1990
• Publisher: Irwin Pub
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 1.0" x 7.8"
• Age Range: 13 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 8

Customer Reviews

Expands the possibilities of writing workshops

Living Between the Lines is a great book for people who have some experience using writing workshops in their classrooms and are looking for ways to help students find interesting and meaningful topics for writing. Calkins' explains her use of notebooks to get students to become more aware of their surroundings and more sensitive to the importance of daily events. She includes great questions to use when having students review their notebooks. Although the students in the book are elementary children, the questions and activities are helpful for my high school classes. If you have read her earlier book, The Art of Teaching Writing, you will notice that she indicates dissatisfaction with some of the ideas from that book. It's interesting to see how her thinking has evolved. If you've done much work with writing workshops, your thinking has probably been evolving too. This book will help you refine your workshop practices and lead you to keep thinking of ways to keep your students growing as writers and individuals.