Launch a Primary Writing Workshop: Getting Started with Units of Study for Primary Writing, Grades K-2

If the writing workshop is always changing, always haphazard, children remain pawns waiting for their teacher s agenda. For this reason and others, I think it is so important for each day s workshop to have a clear, simple structure. Children should know what to expect. This allows them to carry on; it frees the teacher from choreographing activities and allows time for listening. How we structure the workshop is less important than that we structure it.
Lucy Calkins

Learn how to take your students from pictorial story telling into fluent writing and how Lucy Calkins and her colleagues launch a rigorous and responsive primary writing workshop. Through 2 foundational books The Nuts and Bolts of Teaching Writing and Launching the Writing Workshop and eight online video clips, Lucy and her colleagues provide the strategies, lesson plans, and tools you ll need to jump in and teach writing to your students in powerful, lasting ways.

The Nuts and Bolts of Teaching Writing equips you to teach a productive, well-managed writing workshop, introduces you to the methods that underlie all writing instruction, and helps you plan a yearlong curriculum in the teaching of writing. In addition to guiding you through the classroom systems and teaching structures that are the foundation of a primary writing workshop, this comprehensive overview also includes chapters about working within developmental stages of writing, supporting English language learners, and assessing writers.

Whether you have taught in a writing workshop for years or are just learning the term, Launching the Writing Workshop will offer you a comprehensive plan for the first four weeks of a primary writing workshop. Lucy and Leah Mermelstein present both the precise language and pacing of their teaching and the reasoning behind it, so that you can create the same powerful experiences with your own children. Whether writers write just a few labels on items in their pictures or write paragraphs, by the end of this unit all children know that in order to write, a writer fills him or herself with an idea, plans how the text will go, and then draws and writes as best he and she can, working to make the page match the writer s vision.

The eight accompanying video clips convey the inner workings of writing workshops in a variety of primary classrooms. These live-from-the-classroom video clips are supported and enhanced by an optional voice-over coaching commentary from Lucy that explains the teaching moves and strategies.