The Writing Revolution: A Guide to Advancing Thinking Through Writing in All Subjects and Grades 1st Edition

I found The Writing Revolution while searching for “content area writing” and “writing across the curriculum” resources to use in homeschooling my daughter. While some materials that are written for the classroom are hard to put into practice in a homeschooling situation, such is not the case with this book. Rather, having tried several homeschool writing curricula, and not having found anything that really “clicked” for us, I feel like I have found what I have been looking for in this book. Some of the things that this book advocates and that work well in the homeschool setting are: starting with what the student is able to do, not what they “should” be able to do according to age or grade level; using the student’s work to inform instruction; using a “gradual release of responsibility” model (I don’t remember this exact term being used in the book, but it addresses starting with modeling, then doing activities together, and gradually moving towards students being able to do things independently); and writing in the content areas to reinforce what is being learned in subject areas such as history and science, rather than having a separate writing curriculum that is unrelated to what is being studied in other areas.In some ways, I think this method would be easier to apply in the homeschool than the classroom, because it is easier to differentiate instruction when you are working with fewer students, who are usually different ages, and homeschooling parents are more likely to be teaching multiple subjects to their children, so integrating writing instruction with content area learning makes sense and is easier to implement than in a school setting where, at least at the secondary level, you are more likely to have different teachers for different subjects. The only drawback I can see in a homeschool setting is that more teacher preparation is required compared to other homeschool writing curricula, because the lessons are meant to be integrated into the content areas, and are not all pre-planned. This might make it difficult for a homeschooling parent who is juggling multiple children of various ages, especially if they have babies and toddlers in the mix (I only have two kids, ages 12 and 16, and am only homeschooling my 12 year old). But the benefit of this method is that it will help you to provide a very individualized writing program that can be easily adapted to your child’s needs and abilities.

This book is absolutely amazing! I read it over the summer and come to find out, we are doing a book study with this book this fall at my school. My principal was so excited to hear that I am familiar with it. It has helped me to change my entire philosophy and approach to teaching writing. I would recommend this book to everyone that struggles to teach writing effectively, no matter the grade level!!!

I highly recommend this resource for all English teachers and for anyone who wants to improve their own writing or help someone else improve theirs. Great and easy to follow ideas and suggestions.

Although I got some good ideas on how to incorporate some writing strategies I think it is better suited for 3rd grade and up. I wish there was something similar for the early grades. Perhaps the new version that is due this summer will include more.

This makes year 37 for me, and I have taught ELA for the entirety of my career. There are a lot of techniques and procedures in this book that I had been using for years, but this past year one of my colleagues suggested this book to me. Of course, I ordered it immediately, and I am blown away!This book makes writing instruction so approachable, no matter what discipline you teach. The author addresses building blocks to help alleviate the monumental task of writing for students and even suggests ways for teachers to avoid the grading essays plague.This is a must-have for teachers, no matter what grade level or class subject!

This is an excellent book containing a wealth of practical wisdom on teaching writing. The approach is grounded in research on best practices and the activities and strategies are explained in a clear, straighforward way that is very accessible to anyone implementing them. The methods are simultaneously both highly structured and flexible. The sentence level work is so valuable for students and often missing from other approaches to writing instruction. Explicitly teaching and providing deliberate practice with high impact grammatical structures like appositives and subordinate clauses is a brilliant move, effectively giving students important tools for thinking. The outlining template is excellent and makes a whole lot more sense than the multitude of graphic organizers students are often given and too often confused by. The sharp focus on embedding writing instruction in the content of the curriculum is critically important. This guide provides not only the broad strokes and a detailed blueprint for putting it into practice, but also a number of valuable nuggets of guidance and tips (how to prevent unintended confusion when giving students sentence expansion activiites; avoiding highlighters because students tend to highlight too much when using them; asking students to create multiple topic sentences for the same topic, etc.). The book also contains many useful photocopiable resources. It deserves a spot on every teacher's shelf; I know I'll be referring to it often!

Inspirational and helpful. I teach 5th grade and it have changed my perspective on how to teach writing.

I have always struggled to teach writing this book provides easy step by step instructions for 1-12th grade and I knw my students writing improved immediately after implementing the basics.