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Fun-Size Academic Writing for Serious Learning TEKS Alignment
25 Ways to Use Great Student Essays
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Sometime a student’s best teacher is another student.
Just as the pressure for students to perform well on state assessments escalates ever higher, and the call to raise students’ achievement in narrative, opinion/argument , and informative/explanatory writing grows louder, Gretchen Bernabei and Judi Reimer publish Fun-Size Academic Writing for Serious Learning. If ever there were a book to answer every need, this is it.
You see, Gretchen and Judi have been concerned about adolescents’ writing for years, and they have had amazing success using mentor texts by students to teach the ins and outs of writing in any genre. So with this book, they “hand over their file drawers” and provide you with 101 essays written by students with one-page companion lessons that address text structure, imagery, dialogue, rhetorical devices, grammatical structures, textual blends--all the different tools that writers use.
Organized into three major sections that align with the Common Core, STAAR, and other major state assessments, Fun-Size Academic Writing delivers succinct, powerhouse instruction on topics such as:
- How to choose a structure for argument, informational, or narrative writing
- How to read a piece and extract thesis statement and main points
- How to layer a wide range of details to support points
- How to use rhetorical devices and grammatical constructions for effect
- How to write from the point of view of a fictional character
The essays—also available in reproducible form on the companion website--demonstrate something striking, something imitable, something concrete. They give students a bank of choices to call upon as they write. The lessons are short, practical, and full of variety. Collectively, these essays and lessons have the potential to move the needle on American students’ writing achievement once and for all. They show what has been done by students—and they reveal to you how your own students can do it, too.
For more resources, visit the Companion Website.
Visit Gretchen’s Writing Tools Blog!
http://bernabeiwritingtools.blogspot.com/
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Author Bio
A popular workshop presenter and winner of NCTE’s James Moffett Award in 2010, Gretchen Bernabei has taught middle school and high school for 34 years. She has devoted her professional life to learning, developing, and sharing best practices, particularly through the National Writing Projects.
Judi Reimer taught fourth grade in San Antonio, Texas, for seventeen years and continues to advise students and school districts. She has worked as a freelance writer, contributing columns and features for Parents, Ladies’ Home Journal, and other national magazines. Judi has also written articles for Studies Weekly classroom publications and has been a freelance writer for American Legacy Publishing.