It's Arrived!

Teaching Pre K-8, Nov/Dec 2004 by Broderick, Patricia, Raymond, Allen

It's Arrived!

Regie Routman's newest book is here and it's a smasher. Writing Essentials: Raising Expectations and Results While Simplifying Teaching (Heinemann, 2005) is all about teaching kids how to write, and providing those invaluable (but trademark Regie) suggestions and activities that tie in reading growth with writing proficiency.

Teachers struggling with writing never seem to feel that they're doing the job they should do. In this book, Regie steps in and demonstrates exactly what she's thinking while she's conducting writing lessons, and how the kids react. And, you can rest assured these are real kids on whom she's reporting. Her voice is totally authentic, no matter what the lesson.

Providing a blueprint for teachers makes this book priceless. One of Regie's main purposes in writing this book "is to make teaching writing easier, more manageable, and more fun." She continues, "Teaching writing is a serious problem in many schools. We are overfocused on procedures, processes, genres, and testing and underfocused on thinking, communicating, inquiring and exploring language." Amen to that.

The book has five parts: 1) The Essential Writing Life, 2) Teaching Essentials, 3) The Essential Writing Day, 4) Advocacy is Also Essential and 5) Teaching in Action: Lesson Essentials.

In the first part - The Essential Writing Life - Regie identifies the essential elements of teaching writing, models manageable procedures being explicit about what good writers do. She introduces the 12 Writing Essentials that are applicable from kindergarten through high school (and beyond), changing only in the level of support writers require and the complexity of their texts.

Regie also shares her own "Top Five Things I Do to Ensure Students Become Excellent Writers." A goldmine. No small part of this is how Regie starts with celebration. She advises teachers to start with stones...family stories, stories that build trust and community. To build trust, Regie tells her own stories. She introduces the optimal learning model, a central feature of her work which consists of demonstration, shared demonstration, guided practice, independent practice, celebration and sharing.

Teaching Essentials covers raising expectations, including more shared writing and capitalizing on the reading-writing connection.

The Essential Writing Day does a beautiful job on integrating basic skills, organizing for daily writing and conferencing with students. This is a bugaboo for many teachers, but again Regie tells you just what to do and say during a conference and what issues inevitably arise in professional discussions. Regie talks about making assessment count and discusses the distinction between the assessment of learning and assessment for learning.

The Advocacy portion of the book is vintage Routman: Regie explores the need for teachers to be leaders, not followers. She promotes courage to override directives when a teacher's professional knowledge and experience tells him or her there's a better way. This section is worth the price of the whole book.

Part five of this book provides five-day lesson plans for five special areas; heart poems, procedural writing, hero writing, teaching persuasive writing and secrets of second graders.

There's a wonderful appendix that provides tons of professional development along with enrichment writing activities for the classroom.

There's a super DVD with clips of Regie's conferences and student writing examples. There's so much in the book we feel guilty not being able to tell you ALL about it. Do visit www. heinemann.com for a more comprehensive look at the best $32 you'll ever spend.

If you can't have Regie in your classroom, this book is the next best thing.

Heinemann Publishers

www.heinemann.com

LUCKY SUBSCRIBER

Catherine Dunaway

Lisle, IL