Offers a step-by-step process to improve students? Writing skills using research-based graphic organizers. More than 60 Writing prompts review the five communication processes: Narration, Description, Directions, Explanation, and Persuasion. Students write to the 11 modes of Writing: summary, fictional narrative, personal experience narrative, informational report, letter, invitation, thank-you note, letter to the editor, directions, persuasive paper, and journal.

In Learning Targets, Connie M. Moss and Susan M. Brookhart contend that improving student learning and achievement happens in the immediacy of an individual lesson--what they call "today's lesson"—or it doesn't happen at all. The key to making today's lesson meaningful? Learning targets. Written from students' point of view, a learning target describes a lesson-sized chunk of information and skills that students will come to know deeply. Each lesson's learning target connects to the next lesson's target, enabling students to master a coherent series of challenges that ultimately lead to important curricular standards. Drawing from the authors' extensive research and professional learning partnerships with classrooms, schools, and school districts, this practical book - Situates learning targets in a theory of action that students, teachers, principals, and central-office administrators can use to unify their efforts to raise student achievement and create a culture of evidence-based, results-oriented practice. - Provides strategies for designing learning targets that promote higher-order thinking and foster student goal setting, self-assessment, and self-regulation. - Explains how to design a strong performance of understanding, an activity that produces evidence of students' progress toward the learning target. - Shows how to use learning targets to guide summative assessment and grading. Learning Targets also includes reproducible planning forms, a classroom walk-through guide, a lesson-planning process guide, and guides to teacher and student self-assessment. What students are actually doing during today's lesson is both the source of and the yardstick for school improvement efforts. By applying the insights in this book to your own work, you can improve your teaching expertise and dramatically empower all students as stakeholders in their own learning.

WINNER OF THE 2009 ASSOCIATION OF EDUCATIONAL PUBLISHERS' DISTINGUISHED ACHIEVEMENT AWARD AND THE 2010 TEACHERS' CHOICE AWARD FOR THE CLASSROOM! Use writing to teach the content areas! Check students content-area knowledge, writing skills, and critical thinking at the same time! Fun, authentic writing activities for language arts, math, science, social studies, and health/nutrition take students through the entire writing process, from brainstorming to publishing, while letting imaginations soar. This content-area writing series includes one grade-level book each for third, fourth, and fifth grade, offering the flexibility to pick from a variety of activities. Choose the activities from each grade that appeal most to your students, or use only the book for your grade to match your students skill levels and target grade-appropriate content-area topics and writing skills. Each ready-to-go activity includes lesson plans, extensions, rubrics, student worksheets, and examples clearly lists objectives, materials and teacher preparation needed, and what prior knowledge and skills are being targeted is easily di fferentiated to meet students needs can be used on its own, with other content-area activities, or as class time allows connects to national content-area and writing standards reflects grade-appropriate language and writing skills Publishing ideas, bibliographies, student checklists, and correlations to commonly taught writing standards and craft skills make this resource complete and easy to use. You ll never run out of authentic ways to make learning through writing fun.

Assess student knowledge of the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) for Reading and Writing with two full-length Assessments for each subject. Questions provide students with the necessary practice needed to achieve academic success on STAAR. Chapters on test-taking strategies and test anxiety build students’ confidence and test-taking skills. Glossaries familiarize students with vocabulary terms and concepts found on state proficiency tests. Answers are provided in the Parent/Teacher Edition only.

Cultivate a love for science by providing standards-based practice that captures childrenÕs attention. Spectrum Science for grade 4 provides interesting informational text and fascinating facts about energy alternatives, plant and animal classification, and the conservation of matter. --When children develop a solid understanding of science, theyÕre preparing for success. Spectrum Science for grades 3-8 improves scientific literacy and inquiry skills through an exciting exploration of natural, earth, life, and applied sciences. With the help of this best-selling series, your little scientist can discover and appreciate the extraordinary world that surrounds them!

This excellent resource provides a realistic and systematic process that educators can immediately implement for improving reading and writing while enhancing content knowledge and skills.

In early twentieth-century Cuba, bandits terrorize the countryside as a young farm girl struggles with dyslexia. Based on the life of the author's grandmother.

This is an utterly original and completely beguiling prose novel about a boy who has to write a poem, and then another, and then even more. Soon the little boy is writing about all sorts of things he has not really come to terms with, and astounding things start to happen.