The Middle School Writing Toolkit: Differentiated Instruction across the Content Areas (Maupin House)

Designed specifically for all middle-school teachers, The Middle School Writing Toolkit has everything needed to get your writer's workshop up and running?whether you're a language arts teacher looking for new writing workshop ideas or a subject-area teacher who wants to improve the quality of student papers. The Middle School Writing Toolkit addresses the five major writing genres that middle-school students are expected to master?reports, persuasive essays, how-to (procedural) essays, narratives, and literary responses?and provides mini-lessons and tasks to start English teachers well on their way to creating a successful writing program in the classroom. Teachers in other subjects will find plenty of writing tasks on research, informational reports, biographies, and more to work into their daily curriculum, allowing for both subject exploration and writing mastery. Fifty-seven writing mini-lessons and more than 200 differentiated workstation tasks, as well as time-saving forms, charts, and rubrics, make this a complete and useful resource for any middle-school classroom. With The Middle School Writing Toolkit, you can transform your classroom into a successful writer's workshop and students of all abilities can master writing in any genre.

Tim Clifford is a native New Yorker who has taught English for the last 18 years in New York City schools. His experience has given him insight into teaching writing skills to diverse populations. As a middle-school English teacher, he felt the need for resources specifically targeted to students in this age group, and so he decided to fill the gap by writing The Middle School Writing Toolkit.

Tim is a graduate of SUNY/New Paltz, where he earned his B.A. in English. He earned a Masters degree in English/Secondary Education from the City University of New York at Queens College.