Customer Reviews

Living Between the Lines

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Living Between the Lines is a great book for people who have some experience using writing workshops in their classrooms and are looking for ways to help students find interesting and meaningful topics for writing. Calkins' explains her use of notebooks to get students to become more aware of their surroundings and more sensitive to the importance of daily events. She includes great questions to use when having students review their notebooks. Although the students in the book are elementary children, the questions and activities are helpful for my high school classes. If you have read her earlier book, The Art of Teaching Writing, you will notice that she indicates dissatisfaction with some of the ideas from that book. It's interesting to see how her thinking has evolved. If you've done much work with writing workshops, your thinking has probably been evolving too. This book will help you refine your workshop practices and lead you to keep thinking of ways to keep your students growing as writers and individuals.

Living Between the Lines is a must-have reference for teachers implementing the reading/writing workshop. Ideas apply for students from grades 3-12.