Writing Anchors: Explicit Lessons That Identify Criteria, Offer Strategic Support, and Lead Students to Take Ownership of Their Writing

This comprehensive handbook shows teachers how to build a foundation for writing with effective lessons that are the key to powerful writing workshops.

Writing Anchors demonstrates how to create a supportive classroom, model writing experiences, and create enthusiasm for writing among students. The practical lessons explore the major elements of writing, with explicit strategies for teaching the major forms of writing:

• Informational writing—detailed descriptions of ways to take and organize notes, use text features, and create reports that have voice;
• Poetry and personal writing— language choice, imagery, using the senses, and finding the personal pulse of the writer;
• Narrative—extends writing skills with lessons on story sequence, problem solving, and character development.

The lessons form "metacognitive anchors" that build an understanding of the elements of powerful writing. Each lesson comes with an anchor cue card that prompts students to apply their growing understandings independently in writing workshops and in assessing their own writing. In addition, the book provides more than thirty effective tools that are ready to copy and use in the classroom—writing checklists, rubrics for assessment, graphic organizers, note-taking grids, semantic maps, story maps, tips for proofing, and student examples collected from grade 2–7 classrooms.