Provides helpful guidance for anyone using the
Writing Strands curriculum!
Teachers will find this an invaluable resource, not only for using the Writing Strands curriculum but also for teaching any course that includes writing and literature as a component. The
Teaching Companion provides a helpful overview of the
Writing Strands system, as well as additional information on a range of writing, grammar, and literature issues that a teacher may face at any level of the program.
- Provides discussion of the most common difficulties that students encounter, as well as tips on how to help students overcome these challenges
- Offers suggested goals and objectives for teaching literature, broken down by age range
- Includes appendices with information on basic citation, advice on teaching vocabulary, commonly confused words, and glossaries of grammar and literary terms.
We highly recommend that teachers read the
Teaching Companion before their students start the course and that they continue to consult it as needed as students learn additional concepts.
Dave Marks, the founder of National Writing Institute and the author of the
Writing Strands and
Reading Strands series of books, graduated from Western Michigan University. He then received a Masters of Arts degree from Central Michigan University and did 45 more hours of graduate work in English at Eastern Michigan University and Michigan State University. Dave retired after 30 years of teaching writing in college, high school, junior high and grade school.
When their son was in the fourth grade, Dave and his wife Lea realized that he was not being given the training they felt he needed and elected to homeschool him in language arts. To prepare him for college writing, they designed a series of lessons, which he completed by the age of twelve. That summer, they enrolled him in freshman English at Lake Michigan College, where he received his first A in college work. He is now a poet and university professor.
Dave and Lea later turned these lessons into the Writing Strands series of books. While Dave never maintained that the series could create poets for other homeschooling parents, he felt that if children worked successfully through the Writing Strands series of books, they would have the skills needed for the challenge of any writing assignment in their undergraduate college work.