Teacher Resource Book

Teacher Resource Book

18 Easy Step-by-Step Lessons With Models and Writing Frames That Guide All Students to Succeed

Teaching for Joy and Justice is the much-anticipated sequel to Linda Christensen's bestselling Reading, Writing, and Rising Up. Christensen is recognized as one of the country's finest teachers. Her latest book shows why. Through story upon story, Christensen demonstrates how she draws on students' lives and the world to teach poetry, essay, narrative, and critical literacy skills. Teaching for Joy and Justice reveals what happens when a teacher treats all students as intellectuals, instead of intellectually challenged. Part autobiography, part curriculum guide, part critique of today's numbing standardized mandates, this book sings with hope -- born of Christensen's more than 30 years as a classroom teacher, language arts specialist, and teacher educator. Practical, inspirational, passionate: this is a must-have book for every language arts teacher, whether veteran or novice. In fact, Teaching for Joy and Justice is a must-have book for anyone who wants concrete examples of what it really means to teach for social justice.

Ideal for preparing your fourth-grade students for state writing assessments and meeting new standards, this series offers scaffolded text-based writing practice with essential nonfiction writing forms, such as: - Compare and contrast - Explanatory - Informative - Cause and effect - Opinion - Argument The 12 units provide activities that prepare students to complete text-dependent writing prompts. Each unit begins with a unit focus and lesson checklist to guide students through the learning path, which includes: - a dictionary page that introduces content words - close reading of a leveled nonfiction article - text-dependent comprehension questions to support understanding - a graphic organizer to help students organize information from the article and plan their writing - a text-dependent writing prompt - a writing evaluation that guides students in evaluating their essay Teachers will appreciate these additional resources and features - Downloadable home-school connection activities and projects help teachers encourage learning at home. - Common Core State Standards correlations are located on each unit for easy reference. - The reading level is provided to help identify appropriate texts. - The suggested learning path helps teachers pace the lesson, and makes scaffolding easy The fourth grade content-area topics fall under these categories: - Biographies - Science articles - Social studies articles

Teacher Resource Book

What will students be asked to do when faced with the writing tasks on the Common Core State Standards assessments? What are the instructional shifts teachers will need to make so that students can understand and master them? Kelly Sassi and Anne Ruggles Gere unpack the PARCC and Smarter Balanced approaches to writing assessment, and provide effective strategies to help students develop as writers as well as prepare for the new writing tasks. Writing on Demand for the Common Core State Standard Assessments provides teachers with the principles of effective writing and then shows how to apply those principles to the Common Core assessments. Samples of performance tasks with student responses illustrate the importance of helping writers: analyze prompts, including those of Smarter Balanced and PARCC build reading skills that support text-dependent writing transfer writing strategies to science and social studies manage time in a digital space. Producing an effective piece of writing can be challenging in any timed writing context. Give your students the strategies they'll need to succeed on the Common Core State Standards writing assessments- and become better writers for life.