Writing Essentials: Raising Expectations and Results While Simplifying Teaching [With DVD]

by Regie Routman

Book Overview

What does great writing instruction look like and sound like?
How do successful teachers of writing get great writers who enjoy writing?
Where do they 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 writing-and poetry applying shared writing across the grades and across the curriculum teaching editing and revision mapping out your writing instruction with Regie's own flexible, five-day lesson-planning model. 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.

For more information on using the DVD, please click here.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0325006016
• ISBN13: 9780325006017
• Release Date: October 2004
• Publisher: Heinemann Educational Books
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 1.77 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 7.4" x 9.3"
• Grade Range: Kindergarten to Grade 6

Customer Reviews

Finally! Answers to How to Teach Writing

Wow! I've read plenty of books regarding how to score or grade students' writing, but this book finally contains the "how" of teaching writing. It's chalk-full of realistic ideas for writing instruction that makes writing a part of what students are learning, not a separate activity. Regie also gives plenty of hands-on examples as well as practical tips for integrating writing into every day instruction, while actually suggesting less work for teachers, not more. I couldn't recommend a better book for teachers of writing!

Excellent for beginning teachers

This is an awesome resource for new and student teachers. Very simple, basic and claerly written.

Content, NOT conventions!

I purchased this book a few months ago as a textbook requirement for a graduate course I took. Little did I know that I would end up dog-earing practically every page! Regie's approach to teaching writing resounded with me on so many levels. As a kindergarten teacher coming off her first year in a classroom, I had felt a nagging dissatisfaction with our school's packaged writing "program", but really didn't have the professional chops to move from yammering at my kids about sentence conventions and "three sentences, three capitals, three periods!" to teaching the writing process in a joyful way. This book was an awakening, because it showed me how to do just that. If you're a teacher of just about any grade level, and you're uneasy about producing a classroom full of automatons who write in lockstep, BUY THIS BOOK. Yes, it is a textbook, but it doesn't read like one. Nigh unto every page is flooded with examples from Regie's own teaching experiences, and-- as if that weren't good enough-- the appendices give you the lessons Regie taught WORD-FOR-WORD so you can model her practices in your classroom! I cannot speak highly enough of this book. I wish more teachers had the opportunity to learn from Regie and realize that writing CAN be a joyful experience!

Writing Essentials

This book is an outstanding resource for K-5 teachers who want to bring joy and student engagement to classroom writing. It is a simple, straight forward approach that is extremely teacher friendly. Every elementary school teacher will benefit from reading it...and watching the DVD that accompanies the book.

Great book for writing workshop

Regie gives an easy to understand approach on how to effectively teach writing in her aptly named book Writing Essentials. She includes many examples and ideas that you can implement right away, and the book even has a dvd that shows her teaching. She really makes you evaluate your teaching, your students, and how to figure out what is important and effective. This book is great for all teachers of grades 1-5, maybe even beyond.