It’s one of education’s greatest challenges: How do we shape our youngest students, who often are just learning how to hold a pencil, into capable writers within the span of a single school year?
Text Structures from Nursery Rhymes offers the solution: a clear and actionable framework for guiding young students to write successfully in any style, from narrative to descriptive to persuasive.
The key to the strategy lies in using familiar text structures to break down a story into its main components ― for example, "Where I was," "Who I saw," and "What I thought" ― in order to immediately thrust students into the role of the writer.
This groundbreaking book provides 53 lessons, each centered around a classic nursery rhyme, and all the tools you’ll need to
- Capitalize on the story’s rhythm and rhyme to make an instant connection with your students
- Convey the story’s text structure using the lesson’s whimsical illustrations, providing a visual model that resonates with children
- Lead the classroom in creating new stories ― in words, pictures, or both ― utilizing the text structure you’ve defined
- Put each nursery rhyme to work as a springboard for important language-arts topics
- Fine-tune your approach at every step based on your preferred teaching style and students’ progress
Put Text Structures from Nursery Rhymes to work in your classroom and discover how text structures, already a remarkable success in later grades, can also have a profound impact on younger students’ progress.
Bonus!
Includes eight downloadable paper dolls―1 man, 1 woman, 1 girl, 1 boy, and 4 animals. Your students can use the paper dolls to retell the nursery rhymes, illustrate their own stories based on a nursery rhyme, or even to act out stories from other books in your classroom library.
A popular workshop presenter and winner of NCTE’s James Moffett Award in 2010,
Gretchen Bernabei has been teaching kids to write in middle school and high school classrooms for more than thirty years. In addition to four other professional books and numerous articles for NCTE journals, she is the author of National Geographic School Publications’
The Good Writer’s Kit, as well as
Lightning in a Bottle, a CD of visual writing prompts.
Kayla Shook, also known as Texas Teaching Fanatic, has been teaching 4th grade for 9 years in central Texas. She works with teachers throughout the state to implement successful writing strategies. She lives with her husband and son in San Marcos, TX.
With more than 30 years in education, Jayne Hover has taught elementary, middle, and high school and been an administrator in several roles. She loves helping kids develop confidence through writing and has been instrumental in improving scores drastically on state-mandated tests. Jayne is a co-author of Crunchtime (2009, Heinemann), Text Structures from Nursery Rhymes (2018, Corwin), and Text Structures and Fables, Teaching Students to Write About What They Read (2023, Corwin). She lives near San Antonio, Texas and enjoys spending time with her husband, Jim.
