This series of books is designed to help upper elementary teachers teach a rigourous yearlong writing curriculum.

"The start of first grade is a time for dusting off the skills and habits that children learned during kindergarten. In the first unit, Building Good Reading Habits, you'll reinforce children's learning from kindergarten, and you'll establish ability-based partnerships that tap into the social power of peers working together to help each other become more strategic as readers. The second unit, Learning About the World: Reading Nonfiction, taps into children's natural curiosity as they explore nonfiction, while you teach comprehension strategies, word solving, vocabulary, fluency, and author's craft. The third unit, Readers Have Big Jobs to Do: Fluency, Phonics, and Comprehension, focuses on the reading process to set children up to read increasingly complex texts. The last unit of first grade, Meeting Characters and Learning Lessons: A Study of Story Elements, spotlights story elements and the skills that are foundational to literal and inferential comprehension, including empathy, imagination, envisioning, prediction, character study, and interpretation"--provided by publisher.

Originally published as part of the bestselling series: Units of study in opinion/argument, information, and narrative writing [Grades K-8].

"Writing allows each of us to live with that special wide-awakeness that comes from knowing that our lives and our ideas are worth writing about." -Lucy Calkins Teaching Writing is Lucy Calkins at her best-a distillation of the work that's placed Lucy and her colleagues at the forefront of the teaching of writing for over thirty years. This book promises to inspire teachers to teach with renewed passion and power and to invigorate the entire school day. This is a book for readers who want an introduction to the writing workshop, and for those who've lived and breathed this work for decades. Although Lucy addresses the familiar topics-the writing process, conferring, kinds of writing, and writing assessment- she helps us see those topics with new eyes. She clears away the debris to show us the teeny details, and she shows us the majesty and meaning, too, in these simple yet powerful teaching acts. Download a sample chapter for more information.