Synopsis
Writing as a Way of Knowing will help you create a writer's workshop in your classroom and show you how to sustain it as you learn to support your students as effective writers across the curriculum.
You'll learn how to help your students discover the writing topics that matter to them and will sustain them over multiple drafts. Your goal as a writing teacher is to help your students become flexible writers who understand all that writing can do and how to use it to serve their own purposes.
Once you and your students are thinking like writers, you're ready for Chapter 3, How to Design and Run a Writer's Workshop, written by veteran teacher Greg Chapnik. Greg covers all the details: implementing effective mini-lessons, conducting thought-provoking writing conferences, handling revising, editing, and publishing, and beginning again with another writing topic of personal interest.
In the chapter called What Writers Need, Lois helps you give your students the instruction and response they need to write well. You can provide your students with everything that encourages brilliant writing: lots of practice, opportunities to share writing with a caring, responsive audience, and focused instruction from a skillful writing teacher. You'll also learn what constitutes effective writing and how to help your students understand and use these qualities in their own writing.
Of course, you must keep an eye on the skills: spelling, punctuation, and grammar. Lois explains the basics of how skills develop, how to teach them within the context of real writing, and how to help young writers monitor their use of conventional spelling, punctuation, and grammar. In this way, your students will discover why conventions are important and why they'll want their writing to reflect skillful use of conventions.
Writing as it applies throughout the curriculum is covered in a chapter on students as independent researchers, tracking down, sorting, and presenting data in a wide variety of formats. Using a four-step instructional strategy for introducing new genres, Lois explores journal writing, poetry, and other reasons to write.
By the time you've finished this book, you may echo the words of teacher Cynthia Bencal who said of her classroom writer's workshop, "My students own their own stories. They like to write. They are writers now and, best of all, they want to continue to be writers when they grow up."