“They're All Writers” will help teachers explore the power of writing centers. In elementary school classrooms across the country, writing instruction (not grammar worksheets or spelling drills) is still the neglected “R.” In this book, classroom teachers will find foundational information about the writing process with everything they need to begin and facilitate a peer tutoring writing center. Student-led writing centers harness the social and instructional power of students working and learning together, and this book includes specific lessons to teach students how to be effective peer tutors and how to be better writers. Book Features: A new, research-based approach to writing pedagogy that integrates both writing process theories and writing center pedagogies. Complete lesson plans to help teachers implement a writing center curriculum that meets Common Core and other quality standards. An approach that harnesses the power of social learning, develops students as leaders in their schools, and facilitates generative conversations around writing.

#ReadWithJenna Book Club Pick as Featured on Today Emma Roberts Belletrist Book Club Pick A New York Times Book Review’s Group Text Selection "I loved this book not just from the first chapter or the first page but from the first paragraph... The voice is just so honest and riveting and insightful about creativity and life." —Curtis Sittenfeld An extraordinary new novel of art, love, and ambition from Lily King, the New York Times bestselling author of Euphoria Following the breakout success of her critically acclaimed and award-winning novel Euphoria, Lily King returns with another instant New York Times bestseller: an unforgettable portrait of an artist as a young woman. Blindsided by her mother’s sudden death, and wrecked by a recent love affair, Casey Peabody has arrived in Massachusetts in the summer of 1997 without a plan. Her mail consists of wedding invitations and final notices from debt collectors. A former child golf prodigy, she now waits tables in Harvard Square and rents a tiny, moldy room at the side of a garage where she works on the novel she’s been writing for six years. At thirty-one, Casey is still clutching onto something nearly all her old friends have let go of: the determination to live a creative life. When she falls for two very different men at the same time, her world fractures even more. Casey’s fight to fulfill her creative ambitions and balance the conflicting demands of art and life is challenged in ways that push her to the brink. Writers & Lovers follows Casey—a smart and achingly vulnerable protagonist—in the last days of a long youth, a time when every element of her life comes to a crisis. Written with King’s trademark humor, heart, and intelligence, Writers & Lovers is a transfixing novel that explores the terrifying and exhilarating leap between the end of one phase of life and the beginning of another.

From the author of the New York Times bestselling novel Fish in a Tree! Carley uses humor and street smarts to keep her emotional walls high and thick. But the day she becomes a foster child, and moves in with the Murphys, she's blindsided. This loving, bustling family shows Carley the stable family life she never thought existed, and she feels like an alien in their cookie-cutter-perfect household. Despite her resistance, the Murphys eventually show her what it feels like to belong--until her mother wants her back and Carley has to decide where and how to live. She's not really a Murphy, but the gifts they've given her have opened up a new future. "Hunt's writing is fearless and One For The Murphys is a story that is at once compassionate, thought-provoking and beautifully told. From the first page, I was drawn into Carley's story. She is a character not to be missed or forgotten." —Jacqueline Woodson, National Book Award-winning author of Brown Girl Dreaming Winner of the Tassy Walden Award for New Voice in Children's Literature

This book is about teaching writing and the gritty particulars of teaching adolescents. But it is also the planning, the thinking, the writing, the journey: all I've been putting into my teaching for the last two decades. This is the book I wanted when I was first given ninth graders and a list of novels to teach. This is a book of vision and hope and joy, but it is also a book of genre units and minilessons and actual conferences with students. -Penny Kittle What makes the single biggest difference to student writers? When the invisible machinery of your writing processes is made visible to them. Write Beside Them shows you how to do it. It's the comprehensive book and companion video that English/language arts teachers need to ensure that teens improve their writing. Across genres, Penny Kittle presents a flexible framework for instruction, the theory and experience to back it up, and detailed teaching information to help you implement it right away. Each section of Write Beside Them describes a specific element of Penny's workshop: Daily writing practice: writer's notebooks and quick writes Instructional frameworks: minilessons, organization, conferring, and sharing drafts Genre work: narrative, persuasion, and writing in multiple genres Skills work: grammar, punctuation, and style Assessment: evaluation, feedback, portfolios, and grading All along the way, Penny demonstrates minilessons that respond to students' immediate needs, and her Student Focus sections profile and spotlight how individual writers grew and changed over the course of her workshop. In addition, Write Beside Them provides a study guide, reproducibles, writing samples from Penny and her students, suggestions for nurturing your own writing life, and a helpful FAQ. Best of all, the online videos take you right inside Penny's classroom, explicitly modeling how to make the process of writing accessible to all kids. Penny Kittle's active coaching and can-do attitude alone will energize your teaching and inspire you to write with your students. But her strategies, expert advice, and compelling in-class video footage will help you turn inspiration into great teaching. Read Write Beside Them and discover that the most important influence for all young writers is their teacher. Penny was the recipient of the 2009 NCTE Britton Award for Write Beside Them.

In Writers Are Readers, the mutually supportive roles of reading and writing are made visible through the idea of "flipsides;" how a reader's insights can be turned around to provide insights into his own writing, and vice versa. Lester and Reba's trademark engaging style is woven throughout chapters full of sample lessons, student writing samples, and recommended texts for maximizing the flipped concept across the year. "Leading the student to understand what he did as a reader can become a lens that brings into focus what the writer had to do before a reader ever saw the page," they write. Discover fresh new ways to turn reading strategies into writing opportunities that your students will be excited about and deeply understand.

"Lovely and timely. So glad Joshunda is telling our stories." - Jacqueline Woodson Eight-year-old Ava Murray wants to know why there’s a difference between the warm, friendly Bronx neighborhood filled with music and art in which she lives and the Bronx she sees in news stories on TV and on the Internet. When her mother explains that the power of stories lies in the hands of those who write them, Ava decides to become a journalist. I Can Write the World follows Ava as she explores her vibrant South Bronx neighborhood - buildings whose walls boast gorgeous murals of historical figures as well as intricate, colorful street art, the dozens of different languages and dialects coming from the mouths of passersby, the many types of music coming out of neighbors’ windows and passing cars. In reporting how the music and art and culture of her neighborhood reflect the diversity of the people of New York City, Ava shows the world as she sees it, revealing to children the power of their own voice.

From social media to school success—take student writing to the next level! Your students may not realize it, but they’re already writers. All those informal text messages, Instagram captions, and Facebook posts have given them skills they can use as a springboard to the formal, content-specific writing they’ll need for success in school, college, and careers. The key, of course, is practice—plus a little guidance from you. And you’ll be ready, no matter what subject you teach, because this essential reference is packed with relevant, contemporary teaching strategies that are easily customizable to work across content areas. Inside, you’ll find: Engaging exercises based in the kinds of writing students already do Versatile "parachute writings"—quick bursts of practice to drop into a day’s lesson Strategies for introducing academic vocabulary and making it stick Skill-boosting strategies for successful summarizing and using textual evidence Variations specific to all disciplines and content areas Students should be writing daily, in all their classes, and they should be writing a lot, both inside and outside school. With this practical guide, you’ll be ready to help them up their writing game—and make literacy relevant, valuable, and authentic.

There are many ways to show our devotion to an author besides reading his or her works. Graves make for popular pilgrimage sites, but far more popular are writers' house museums. What is it we hope to accomplish by trekking to the home of a dead author? We may go in search of the point of inspiration, eager to stand on the very spot where our favorite literary characters first came to life—and find ourselves instead in the house where the author himself was conceived, or where she drew her last breath. Perhaps it is a place through which our writer passed only briefly, or maybe it really was a longtime home—now thoroughly remade as a decorator's show-house. In A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses Anne Trubek takes a vexed, often funny, and always thoughtful tour of a goodly number of house museums across the nation. In Key West she visits the shamelessly ersatz shrine to a hard-living Ernest Hemingway, while meditating on his lost Cuban farm and the sterile Idaho house in which he committed suicide. In Hannibal, Missouri, she walks the fuzzy line between fact and fiction, as she visits the home of the young Samuel Clemens—and the purported haunts of Tom Sawyer, Becky Thatcher, and Injun' Joe. She hits literary pay-dirt in Concord, Massachusetts, the nineteenth-century mecca that gave home to Hawthorne, Emerson, and Thoreau—and yet could not accommodate a surprisingly complex Louisa May Alcott. She takes us along the trail of residences that Edgar Allan Poe left behind in the wake of his many failures and to the burned-out shell of a California house with which Jack London staked his claim on posterity. In Dayton, Ohio, a charismatic guide brings Paul Laurence Dunbar to compelling life for those few visitors willing to listen; in Cleveland, Trubek finds a moving remembrance of Charles Chesnutt in a house that no longer stands. Why is it that we visit writers' houses? Although admittedly skeptical about the stories these buildings tell us about their former inhabitants, Anne Trubek carries us along as she falls at least a little bit in love with each stop on her itinerary and finds in each some truth about literature, history, and contemporary America.

Jennifer Weiner, author of Good in Bed,In Her Shoes and the forthcoming Who DoYou Love, explores the nuances of female friendship with relish... Addie Downs and Valerie Adler were eight when they first met and decided to be best friends forever. But, in the wake of tragedy and betrayal during their teenage years, everything changed. Val went on to fame and fortune. Addie stayed behind in their small Midwestern town. Destiny, however, had more in store for these two. And when, twenty-five years later, Val shows up at Addie's front door with blood on her coat and terror on her face, it is the start of a wild adventure for two women joined by love and history who find strength together that they could not find alone.

Working-class stories are not always tales of the underprivileged and dispossessed. Common People is a collection of essays, poems and memoir written in celebration, not apology: these are narratives rich in barbed humour, reflecting the depth and texture of working-class life, the joy and sorrow, the solidarity and the differences, the everyday wisdom and poetry of the woman at the bus stop, the waiter, the hairdresser. Here, Kit de Waal brings together thirty-three established and emerging writers who invite you to experience the world through their eyes, their voices loud and clear as they reclaim and redefine what it means to be working class. Features original pieces from Damian Barr, Malorie Blackman, Lisa Blower, Jill Dawson, Louise Doughty, Stuart Maconie, Chris McCrudden, Lisa McInerney, Paul McVeigh, Daljit Nagra, Dave O’Brien, Cathy Rentzenbrink, Anita Sethi, Tony Walsh, Alex Wheatle and more.