Short description:

Ask teachers about their biggest challenges in elementary and middle school, and many will say the teaching of writing. It is often difficult for students find the joy, discovery, and satisfaction writing can yield.

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Long description:

Ask teachers about their biggest challenges in elementary and middle school, and many will say the teaching of writing. It is often difficult for students find the joy, discovery, and satisfaction writing can yield. What Lisa Eickholdt and Patricia Vitale-Reilly have found is that adherence to genre studies can get in the way of student collaboration. Believing writing instruction should be more authentic, they want students to have more choices, develop better collaboration, and sustain a sense of community, all through the implementation of writing clubs.In their book Writing Clubs: Fostering Choice, Collaboration, and Community in the Writing Classroom , you'll discover ways to:

Collaborate throughout the process of writing Choose what to write and how to write it Examine mentor texts and study craft techniques across genres Develop speaking and listening skills Celebrate classmates’ accomplishments through publication

Collaboration is widely recognized as a vital life skill. Eickholdt and Vitale-Reilly present a plethora of ideas on how gratifying it can be right now, as well as in the future. There’s an old proverb that says, ‘If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go with others.’ In Writing Clubs , we discover that there is no limit to how far young writers can go when teachers show them what it means to collaborate.

?One clarion call of the pandemic is that we need to humanize our classrooms. In Writing Clubs, Patty and Lisa offer us a roadmap for how to reimagine writing workshop where children know and value each other as people and writers. They?ve anticipated all of our questions, and every chapter is chock full of answers in the form of easy-to-use calendars, unit plans, schedules, mentor texts, and teacher talk. If you're looking for the future of writing workshop, it's right here.? ?Katie Cunningham, author of Start with Joy and Story.

?Too often when educators think about what their students need to flourish as writers, collaboration is not always at the forefront of our minds. Well, no more! Lisa and Patty demonstrate the myriad of ways collaboration is essential?not in the 'ask students to give feedback around checklist items' approach that is prevalent in classrooms, but as the heartbeat of students' writing lives. Writing Clubs is the book you didn't know you needed, but absolutely do. Lisa and Patty position the kind of collaboration that lives in writing clubs is vital; it is the pulse that propels writers forward and creates transformative writing experiences.? ?Sonja Cherry Paul, educator, author, and co-founder

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