They're here!
Getting Started With the Traits: K-2
If you're a primary-grade teacher who wants to weave the traits into
your writing program but are unsure where to begin, help has arrived!
This book contains just what you need to get started: trait-focused
lessons, activities, reproducibles, scoring guides, conference
comments, scored sample papers, children's book lists, and teaching
tips. But more than just providing "stuff"; we include reliable,
easy-to-follow advice on applying the traits so you can begin seeing
results in your students' work from day one.
Getting Started With the Traits: 3-5
If you're a teacher of grades 3-5 who wants to weave the traits into
your writing program but are unsure where to begin, help has arrived!
This book contains just what you need to get started: trait-focused
lessons, activities, reproducibles, scoring guides, conference
comments, scored sample papers, children's book lists, and teaching
tips. But more than just providing "stuff"; we include reliable,
easy-to-follow advice on applying the traits so you can begin seeing
results in your students' work from day one.
Daily Trait-Writing Warm-Ups
Teaching the most daunting tasks of writing--revision and
editing--just became easier and more manageable with the publication of
this book. Here, we target essential skills with "warmups": short,
powerful activities that provide students with real writing practice in
revising for ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency
and in editing for conventions. From there, students apply what they
learn to their own work, confidently and independently. There's no
better way to get the wheels turning at writing time!
Inside this book, you will find:
- 180 reproducible warm-ups--one for each day of the school year.
- a
CD that enables you to project all 180 warm-ups digitally. You can also
print out copies for small-group and independent practice or create
transparencies for whole-class lessons.
- "Think-Abouts"--important, trait-specific questions students ask themselves as they revise and edit the warm-ups.
- sample responses to revision warm-ups and an answer key for editing warm-ups.
Grading Help Has Arrived!
With the expanded and newly formatted scoring guides in the Getting Started book for Grades 3-5 and The Traits of Writing: The Complete Guide for Middle School, questions about grading continue to abound.
As you know, you can’t convert a rubric score into a grade without a rather complicated mathematical equation, so rather than turn this exercise into a math problem, we’ve providing a handy, dandy chart for you to use. Download it from here and tuck it into your grade book. (You’ll also find a copy on the CD for the middle school book.)
Whether you assess students for one, two, or the maximum of seven traits at a time, this chart will help you record a percentage score in your grade book as you go.
(With gratitude and appreciation to Michael Lippold of Smarticus for this chart. We all hope it makes this one part of your job easier!)
Click here to download!
Below is a link to a timely and informative article by NCTE. This is a great article to share at staff meetings and with colleagues:
http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Resources/PolicyResearch/WrtgResearchBrief.pdf
Wichita Elementary teachers have created this spot for their teachers to share writing strategies and ideas that are working in their classrooms. Check out their RAFTS! Thanks to Brenda Willis for sharing!
The Write Spot
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