This two-book developmental writing series engages using with its environmental theme. A Writer’s Workshop: Crafting Sentences, Building Paragraphs engages developing writers with a hands-on, process-oriented, collaborative, and conscientious approach to writing, treating students as writers and writing as a dynamic process. Throughout, this text offers sound connections between its lessons and students’ existing knowledge. It also explores why we study each writing skill and process, linking lessons to future application in the classroom and beyond.

Writer's Workshop is a family-style program, which means your whole family, from ages six to eighteen and beyond, can use the program together. The activities are meant to be a family affair, with individual expectations being tailored to the ages and abilities of each child. We also encourage you to share completed individual work, like reports, posters, stories, and other writing projects, with one another in share-and-clap sessions.Like all of Layers of Learning, Writer's Workshop is a pick-and-choose curriculum; you don't need to complete everything in the book. Instead, browse through and choose the Mini-Lessons and Exercises that appeal to you and are appropriate for your kids. For a more detailed look at Writer's Workshop, we invite you to read Guidebook: How to Create a Writer's Workshop, which you can find at Layers-of-Learning.com.In general, each unit within this book is designed to last about a month and then be repeated in subsequent years, but the exact schedule and timing are completely up to you. If your kids are engaged and enthusiastic about a topic, feel free to carry on for a little while longer. Writer's Workshop should be a daily part of your homeschool. In Writer's Workshop, each Exercise is one complete lesson plan. The exact length of each one varies and depends on your needs, the ages of the students, and how absorbed in a lesson you get. However, you can generally plan on one hour per lesson. Lessons can stretch over multiple days as needed.