With the guidance of children's writing enthusiast Ruth Shagoury, teachers will learn to listen to all their students and look at their written work with a new and appreciative lens--one that also helps them anticipate and encourage students in developing new skills appropriately. Drawing on her many years of primary classroom teaching and research, Ruth offers primary teachers, early childhood specialists, and caregivers strategies to nurture connections between oral and writing skills at every stage of children's development for today's multicultural classroom. Ruth's thorough exploration of how young children learn written language presents teachers with the necessary tools to understand the growth and development of written language in a literate culture. Filled with a wealth of resources for extending learning beyond the classroom, Raising Writers: Understanding and Nurturing Young Children's Writing Development includes interviews with the author and book study questions making this a perfect book for book club study groups. Help your students make the transition from oral to written language! Explores the written language development of pre-school through primary school age children. Addresses important topics such as the role of the culture of literacy, how drawing and writing go hand-in hand, and the developmental path of spelling and conventions. Identifies the parallels between oral and written language development with the use of a developmental continuum chart. In addition, the book includes an annotated guide with research foundation for the continuum. Includes numerous samples of children's work and photos to bring the information in the book to life. Offers book recommendations for spelling programs and additional writing instruction resources, as well as picture book suggestions for multicultural classrooms. Includes a book club study guide at the end of the book.

The first collection of literary writing on raising a child with special needs, Love You to Pieces features families coping with autism, deafness, muscular dystrophy, Down syndrome and more. Here, poets, memoirists, and fiction writers paint beautiful, wrenchingly honest portraits of caring for their children, laying bare the moments of rage, disappointment, and guilt that can color their relationships. Parent-child communication can be a challenge at the best of times, but in this collection we witness the struggles and triumphs of those who speak their own language-or don't speak at all-and those who love them deeply.

Accompanying DVD includes videos of the author working with student writers.

New York Times Bestseller "Julie Lythcott-Haims is a national treasure. . . . A must-read for every parent who senses that there is a healthier and saner way to raise our children." -Madeline Levine, author of the New York Times bestsellers The Price of Privilege and Teach Your Children Well "For parents who want to foster hearty self-reliance instead of hollow self-esteem, How to Raise an Adult is the right book at the right time." -Daniel H. Pink, author of the New York Times bestsellers Drive and A Whole New Mind A provocative manifesto that exposes the harms of helicopter parenting and sets forth an alternate philosophy for raising preteens and teens to self-sufficient young adulthood In How to Raise an Adult, Julie Lythcott-Haims draws on research, on conversations with admissions officers, educators, and employers, and on her own insights as a mother and as a student dean to highlight the ways in which overparenting harms children, their stressed-out parents, and society at large. While empathizing with the parental hopes and, especially, fears that lead to overhelping, Lythcott-Haims offers practical alternative strategies that underline the importance of allowing children to make their own mistakes and develop the resilience, resourcefulness, and inner determination necessary for success. Relevant to parents of toddlers as well as of twentysomethings-and of special value to parents of teens-this book is a rallying cry for those who wish to ensure that the next generation can take charge of their own lives with competence and confidence.

What is fanfiction, and what is it not? Why does fanfiction matter? And what makes it so important to the future of literature? Fic is a groundbreaking exploration of the history and culture of fan writing and what it means for the way we think about reading, writing, and authorship. It's a story about literature, community, and technology—about what stories are being told, who's telling them, how, and why. With provocative discussions from both professional and fan writers, on subjects from Star Trek to The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Harry Potter, Twilight, and beyond, Fic sheds light on the widely misunderstood world(s) of fanfiction—not only how fanfiction is transforming the literary landscape, but how it already has. Fic features a foreword by Lev Grossman (author of The Magicians) and interviews with Jonathan Lethem, Doug Wright, Eurydice (Vivean Dean), and Katie Forsythe/wordstrings. Cyndy Aleo (algonquinrt; d0tpark3r) V. Arrow (aimmyarrowshigh) Tish Beaty (his_tweet) Brad Bell Amber Benson Peter Berg (Homfrog) Kristina Busse Rachel Caine Francesca Coppa Randi Flanagan (BellaFlan) Jolie Fontenot Wendy C. Fries (Atlin Merrick) Ron Hogan Bethan Jones Christina Lauren (Christina Hobbs/tby789 and Lauren Billings/LolaShoes) Jacqueline Lichtenberg Rukmini Pande and Samira Nadkarni Chris Rankin Tiffany Reisz Andrew Shaffer Andy Sawyer Heidi Tandy (Heidi8) Darren Wershler Jules Wilkinson (missyjack) Jen Zern (NautiBitz)

Exploring Options is designed to help student writers develop their knowledge and use of academic language to meet the demands of college- and university-level writing assignments. It draws on the research identifying lexical and grammatical patterns across academic contexts and provides authentic reading contexts for structured vocabulary learning. Recognizing that vocabulary choices in writing often require consideration of grammatical structure, Exploring Options focuses on specific kinds of lexico-grammatical decisions—that is, the ones involving the interaction between vocabulary and grammar--that students face in shaping, connecting, and restructuring their ideas. The book helps writers learn how to effectively use resources such as learner dictionaries, thesauruses, and concordancers to improve academic word knowledge. Following a unit on using resources for vocabulary development, the contents are divided into three parts: Showing Relationships within Sentences, Connecting and Focusing across Sentences, and Qualifying Statements and Reporting Research. Part 1 focuses on verbs and modifiers that express increases and decreases, verbs and abstract nouns that describe change, connectors and verbs describing causal relationships, and parallel structures. Part 2 explores the words that help connect ideas and add cohesion. Part 3 discusses how to express degrees of certainty and accuracy and the use of reporting verbs.

The most popular question any pregnant woman is asked — aside from "When are you due?" — has got to be "Are you having a girl or a boy?" When author Andrea Buchanan was pregnant with her daughter, she was thrilled to be expecting a girl. Some people were happy for her; visions of flouncy pink dresses and promises of mother-daughter bonding were the predictable responses. Other people, though, were concerned: "Is your husband OK with that?" "You can try again." "Girls are tough." This mixed message led her to explore the issue herself, with help from her fellow writers and moms, many of whom had had the same experience. As she did in It's a Boy: Women Writers on Raising Sons, Buchanan and her contributors take on what it's really like to raise a child-in this case, a girl-from babyhood to adulthood. It's a Girl, is a wide-ranging, often humorous, and honest collection of essays about the experience of the mother-daughter bond, taking on topics like "princess power" ("Shining, Shimmering, Splendid"), adding a girl to a brood of boys ("Confessions of a Tomboy Mom"), dealing with a daughter's eating disorder ("The Food Rules"), and mothering "hardcore mini-feminists" ("Tough Girls").