Students become better writers when they have the techniques at their fingertips. With this book, you'll have the ready-to-go mini-lessons and follow-up practice sheets that target the writing skills students need most. Combine sentences, cut out clutter, remedy run-ons, show-don't-tell, doctoring dialogue, punching up passive sentences, and more! Fully reproducible! Perfect for daily quick-writes! For use with Grades 4 & Up.

Reproducible pages contain lessons such as finding an idea to write about, creating vivid descriptions with sensory details, developing compelling openings, revising, and editing.

Engaging lessons with planning sheets and evaluation checklists to help students master the essentials of a short, focused writing assignment.

Setting Pop-ups, Paper-Chain Characters, Plot Mini-Books, and more to help students "learn by doing." Includes reproducible student direction sheets and rubrics.

"My whole goal with this book was to come at teaching writing from the angle that matters most: students' perspective. They taught me what I needed to know to make this book live up to their passion for writing." Laura Robb Adolescents have robust and rewarding writing lives outside of school that involve journals, emails, text messages, blogs, and an astounding array of genres. Unlike their personal reading lives that teachers frequently tap into, their personal writings typically exist under the curricular radar-that is until now. While grounded in the common schedule constraints and curriculum demands of middle school, Laura Robb's Teaching Middle School Writers offers teachers lessons and routines that are uncommonly attuned to adolescents' developmental and social needs. As she taps into the energy and enthusiasm of adolescents' personal writing lives, Laura presents: writing plans that support first drafts strategies for crafting leads that grab and endings that satisfy grammar lessons that address writing conventions editing lessons that have students revise their writing before the teacher reads it guidelines for grading and responding to student work. Straight-from-the-classroom writing samples and videos give teachers the opportunity to see how Laura uses compelling questions and powerful mentor texts to teach writing, support struggling writers, and weave twenty-first century literacies into the writing curriculum. Throughout, teachers learn ways of connecting to students' lives in order to bring out their best writing, their best self. Watch a video overview.

Help students gain writing confidence with this comprehensive collection of easy, super-engaging lessons that invite them to describe a dream, write a mystery story, create a movie review, compose a business letter, and so many more! Everything you need is here: Complete how-to's, quick mini-lessons, pre-writing graphic organizers, and reproducible assessment forms. A great way to prepare kids to shine on the standardized tests! For use with Grades 3-6.