Customer Reviews

Powerful Writing Strategies for All Students

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"Powerful Writing Strategies For All Students" is the collaborative effort of academicians and teachers Karen R. Harris, Steve Graham, Linda H. Mason, and Barbara Friedlander. Comprised of thoroughly 'user friendly' curriculum lessons ranging from twenty to 60 minutes each, "Powerful Writing Strategies For All Students" is designed to enable the classroom teacher to advance and enhance their student's writing skills such as constructing essays and writing reports for state competency tests; work with every phase of the writing process from initiation to revision; reinforce new writing strategies and skills through individual practice and in group instruction; develop critical self-regulation skills students can use independently; support effective instruction with step-by-step guidelines and optional scripts; and even train students to use effective mnemonic devices that are easily grasped and remembered. Enhanced with photocopiable support materials including cue cards, graphic organizers, sheets for graphing writing performance, an mnemonic charts, "Powerful Writing Strategies For All Students" is a very strongly recommended as a language arts and literacy curriculum and classroom instruction plan supplemental resource.

This book provides an approach to writing instruction that has been unbelievably far more effective with my students than any other writing program that I have ever used - and I have been teaching writing for close to 20 years! It is easy to use, but includes all the most effective practices we all know that we should use but don't have a comprehensive plan for how to use in step by step way such as modeling, analyzing models with structured checklists, providing scaffolds but also how to fade them and ensure transfer of skills to other classes and settings. I could go on and on, but won't describe the approach as well as the book does. Parents and teachers have been amazed at the dramatic improvements their children have made with this approach.

I used this book as the basis for a Writers' Workshop for several of my students with written expression disabilities. The lesson are well written and easy to follow. The students really learned the strategies and used them in their written work. The blackline masters for handouts really saved a lot of time. The first part of the book deals with some meta-cognitive strategies for students. I did not use these as much.

Overall, great book and resource for teachers.

This well written guide to self regulated strategy development (SRSD) provides the teacher a clear description of how to integrate a systematic, but not cook-book, writing strategy instructional block into the classroom.

I really like how the text is written to be digestible. Reading a five hundred page text is not what this book is about. It is about getting the information to teachers. Yes, the research is there, but it is plainly stated and well contextualized. There are a ton of lesson plans/ideas in the whole second part of the book. This is proving to be an excellent resource for the design of my class' writing strategy instruction. I highly recommend it for any K-12 teacher teaching writing.