Getting Started: The Reading-Writing Workshop, Grades 4-8

Whether you're new to the classroom or merely new to the reading-writing workshop, Getting Started is the concise primer you're looking for that will help you implement these powerful teaching frameworks.

Workshop teaching is simple, research based, and rewarding for you and your students. It can be launched by any teacher in any type of classroom, and Getting Started shows you the doable strategies for planning, organizing, teaching, and reflecting that make the workshop so effective. Linda Ellis and Jamie Marsh provide smart, practical advice about working with readers and writers of varying levels - including struggling students - differentiating your instruction to support everyone's needs, and helping diverse groups of children move toward a single classroom-wide goal of improved literacy.

Ellis and Marsh strip the workshop down to its most vital parts and offer you straight-ahead techniques for reading and writing, including:

• reading aloud
• implementing independent reading
• conferring with readers
• working with struggling readers
• conducting writing minilessons
• conferring with writers
• sharing students' work.

With valuable one-on-one instructional strategies, examples of student work, forms, checklists, and other tools, Getting Started includes everything you need to launch your workshop, to better understand your students' literacy needs, and to give them the support they deserve.

Whether you re new to the classroom or merely new to the reading-writing workshop, Getting Started is the concise primer you re looking for that will help you implement these powerful teaching frameworks.

Workshop teaching is simple, research based, and rewarding for you and your students. It can be launched by any teacher in any type of classroom, and Getting Started shows you the doable strategies for planning, organizing, teaching, and reflecting that make the workshop so effective. Linda Ellis and Jamie Marsh provide smart, practical advice about working with readers and writers of varying levels including struggling students differentiating your instruction to support everyone s needs, and helping diverse groups of children move toward a single classroom-wide goal of improved literacy.

Linda Ellis is coauthor of the Heinemann title Getting Started (2007). Currently Associate Professor of Literacy at Sam Houston State University, she has taught in ethnically rich and diverse settings throughout Texas for twenty-three years as a remedial reading and language arts teacher, a language arts program director, and a language arts consultant. She is past president of the Texas Association for the Improvement of Reading and has been active in several local councils of the International Reading Association and the National Council of Teachers of English.

Jamie Marsh is coauthor of the Heinemann title Getting Started (2007). Currently a doctoral student at the University of Virginia's Curry School of Education, she has taught intermediate and middle school English/Language Arts in California and Texas as well as undergraduate literacy methods at Sam Houston State University.