Language Arts & Disciplines : Composition & Creative Writing

Your panacea for lackluster language. Words like interesting and nice are so commonlyused they’ve lost their impact. This book provides you withmore than 3,000 powerful alternatives to tired words and helps you build a stronger vocabulary in the process. Armed with vibrant new words, you can precisely and eloquently express exactly what youwant to communicate in your writing and speech. more...

Price: $14.95

Editing is often seen as one item on a list of steps in the writing process?usually put somewhere near the end, and often completely crowded out of writer's workshop. Too many times daily editing lessons happen in a vacuum, with no relationship to what students are writing. In Everyday Editing, Jeff Anderson asks teachers to reflect on what sort of message this approach sends to students. Does it tell them that editing and revision are meaningful parts of the writing process, or just a hunt for errors with a 50/50 chance of getting it right?comma or no comma? Instead of rehearsing errors and drilling students on what's wrong with a sentence, Jeff invites students to look carefully at their writing along with mentor texts, and to think about how punctuation, grammar, and style can be best used to hone and communicate meaning. Written in Jeff's characteristically witty style, this refreshing and practical guide offers an overview of his approach to editing within the writing workshop as well as ten detailed sets of lessons covering everything from apostrophes to serial commas. These lessons can be used throughout the year to replace Daily Oral Language or error-based editing strategies with a more effective method for improving student writing. more...

Price: $14.80

A clear, engaging and practical 'how-to' guide to writing a memoir, by Australia's foremost teacher and practitioner of memoir and life writing, Patti Miller. more...

Price: $19.95

What is a narrative? What is narrative fiction? How does it differ from other kinds of narrative? Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan provides a synthesis of contemporary approaches to narrative fiction, considering in particular Anglo-American New Criticism, Russian Formalism and French Structuralism. more...

Price: $28.95

It's not easy being a tween. A lot of us are either in a tunnel or a bridge. A lot of us don't know who we are. Instead of following Barney's advice, we end up doing what popstars do. ?Kelley, age 10No longer little children, but not yet teenagers, tweens are beginning to see themselves as autonomous while still struggling to understand where they fit in. It can also be an awkward time for teachers who cherish the hilarious and poignant personalities of tween writers, but feel pressured by a new emphasis on testing in the intermediate grades. Many teachers have virtually abandoned writers' workshops in favor of formula writing and prompts, even though these workshops may be essential for understanding the emerging competencies and personalities of eight- to twelve-year-olds. Bruce Morgan and Deb Odom teach together at a school where formula writing and test preparation led to stagnant writing scores, student boredom, and teacher discouragement. They worked with their colleagues in grades 3?6 to make some dramatic changes in their collective writing instruction. These changes included a return to their roots as writing workshop teachers, but with new twists. The teaching staff drew up new common standards for writing assessment and achievement. The revised writing programs also involved integrating insights from reading strategy instruction with a renewed emphasis on the basics of writers' workshop: student choice, teacher modeling, revision, and using quality children's literature as mentor text. Writing Through the Tween Years documents how teachers can get back to the joys of teaching writing in a literature-rich, thoughtful environment. There may be no better way to understand and reach tween writers. more...

Price: $12.00