WriteShop – Teacher’s Guide 4th ed.

Parents who lack confidence in their own ability to teach their students to write have finally got a resource that takes the guess work out of the process. WriteShop provides detailed daily lesson plans and instructions for teachers plus student workbooks with worksheets and forms that walk you all the way through activities, evaluation and grading. Examples, check lists for both students and teachers, and evaluation forms show students the objectives and teachers what to look for in completed work.

Not only do these features make the program easy to use, but the authors have structured lessons to build from the ground up, covering sentence and paragraph structure and style before tackling lengthier assignments. The subtitle, “An Incremental Writing Program,” refers to the way the program incorporates and builds upon skills taught in previous lessons. Because of this, you should not skip lessons or change the order.

Targeted at students in grades 7-10, WriteShop might actually be used with students in grades 5-10. It works well for parents working with one or more of their own children on their own, but it will also work in a group class situation. It does need to be taught; it is not designed for independent study even though students do much writing on their own. WriteShop is a great starting place for those who have done minimal writing instruction with their children.

The Lessons, each of which might take about two weeks to complete, include “skill builder” exercises that focus on a narrow skill, usually related to grammar or vocabulary. The “skill builder” activity feeds directly into the primary lesson. For example, the second lesson is “Describing a Pet.” The “skill builder” teaches students to use a thesaurus to come up with more interesting words to replace overused adjectives and weak verbs. This skill is then incorporated into the pet description. Many of the grammar-oriented skill builders help students finally see the use of some of their grammar lessons.

Two weeks per lesson sounds like a lot, but the authors have incorporated more than the “skill builder” focus into each lesson. For example, the pet description also works with mind maps, topic sentences, metaphors and similes, and concluding sentences. In addition, students are working through the editing and rewriting process on the original assignment. They also should be completing copying and dictation assignments that build skills of observation and attention while working on various sentence constructions and broader vocabulary. I think the authors have actually resolved a critical problem with copying/dictation by requiring copying first, followed by dictation of the same piece. This way, students have already encountered unusual punctuation or sentence breaks that otherwise might be unpredictable when encountered only through dictation.