Strategic Writing Mini-Lessons for All Students, Grades 4-8
By Janet C. Richards and Cynthia A. Lassonde
(Corwin: A SAGE Company, 2013 - Learn more)

Reviewed by Danielle McIntosh

Differentiation is the hot phrase in education. In Strategic Writing Mini-Lessons for All Students, Grades 4-8, you will find 22 thorough writing mini-lessons on a large variety of topics that include adaptations for struggling writers, English Language Learners and even advanced writers. Each lesson covers all students in your diverse 4-8 class of writers.

An essential question of this book is,

How can we set a solid groundwork so that all students, regardless of skill level, eagerly raise their hands to share their writing at the end of a class?”

To this end, each of the chapters (many written by contributors along with several by the author/editors) covers one mini-lesson with lots of background information and advice for the teacher. The structure is:

• Introduction to the Strategy
• Why This Strategy Is Important
• List of Materials Needed
• Lesson Layout including Sample Discussion
• I Write-We-Write-You-Write
• Student Reflection
• Extend the Strategy Across the Curriculum
• Resources for Further Reading

In my classroom, I found the strategies to be engaging, effective, and practical. The students really enjoyed participating and were able to apply the new knowledge to their own writing.

For example, in the mini-lesson “Creating Rounded Characters Through Cartoon Connections,” author Krishna Seunarinesingh has students create a concept map of a popular cartoon character, in this case SpongeBob SquarePants. She asks her class about how he looks, his personal characteristics, and his relationship with others.

By using a well known character from TV, my class was easily able to brainstorm all sorts of character traits, what characters look like and sound like, how they would react in a specific situation and how they get along with others. When creating a story, students were able to bring so much more life to their characters, and they enjoyed writing about them. At times my students just wanted to list the traits, so we discussed how to weave them into the story or how to “show” instead of “tell.”

Thoughtful adaptations

As a teacher, I found the adaptations part of each lesson to be a true treasure. Oftentimes, adaptations for lower level learners or ELL students can easily be found, but it’s so helpful and unique to find adaptations for advanced writers. I shared my copy of the book with colleagues in general education classrooms and they, too, were impressed with the lessons and the adaptations.

This is not a comprehensive writing curriculum, nor was it intended to be. However, the lessons cover several genres of writing, including persuasive, expository, and narrative. It also touches on prewriting, drafting, revising and editing.

On the front inside cover of the book, there is a handy chart showing the writing Common Core Standards and which mini-lessons cover which standards.

The ideal audience for this book is wide. Whether you work primarily with struggling learners, like me, or your classroom has the typical gamut of learners, you will find lessons and techniques to add to your lesson plans tomorrow.

Danielle McIntosh is a middle school special education teacher at North Tapps Middle School in Lake Tapps, Washington. Her passion for struggling learners in the middle level is evident in her classroom every day. She loves blogging, reading, laughing, and spending time with her husband and two daughters. 

Pyrotechnics on the Page: Playful Craft that Sparks Writing
By Ralph Fletcher
(Stenhouse Publishers, 2010 – Learn more)

Reviewed by Kevin Hodgson

If only every classroom had the kind of playful enthusiasm that Ralph Fletcher envisions and encourages in his wonderful book, Pyrotechnics on the Page. We’d have discovery of puns, idioms, and allusion sitting side by side with invented words and hyperbole, sparking the creative side of young writers. We’d no doubt have more engaged writers to boot.

Instead, we seem to have a rapidly increasing number of classrooms where writing is little more than test prep drilling, and where imaginative exploration increasingly has little opportunity to flourish. We’re creating a generation of test-takers, not writers.

In some ways, Fletcher’s book about the love of language, driven by his advice on how to nurture the natural ways that young children play around with words and phrases, should be required reading for all teachers.

If nothing else, Pyrotechnics on the Page is a refreshing view of just how malleable our language is, and how teaching students to tap into the “playful craft,” as the subtitle suggests, can open up doors for even the most reluctant writers (and Fletcher points out that boys, in particular, can be drawn in to writing when the writing is playful and fun.)

More about the book

Pyrotechnics on the Page is a combination of stories about the oddness of language from Fletcher’s own life (family and school), observations about the value of play in the Language Arts setting, and a series of what Fletcher has long called “craft lessons” that will help any teacher bring elements of figurative language and humor into the classroom.

He wisely divides up the craft lessons into grade spans, adapting the ideas for younger grades as well as older grades. An entire section of questions and answers provides Fletcher with a forum for countering skepticism about the nature of balancing skills and creative writing in the classroom.

I felt a natural connection to Fletcher’s theme here. We’ve just finished up our own unit around figurative language, which ranges from writing tongue twisters for alliteration, to acting out the literal translations of idioms, to writing exaggerated stories and writing poems about feelings, using sensory details.

We are also now in our ninth year of inventing words, which get compiled into what we call our “crazy collaborative dictionary” of made-up words. Our dictionary is a wiki site, and there are now hundreds of words on it, along with podcasts, as current sixth grade students “collaborate” with past students on a living document of nutty, weird words. Fletcher reminds us that inventing words is something that happens naturally in the English Language, and that such activities nurture both the creative and the critical thinking processes of young learners.

If there is a single take-away from Fletcher’s work in Pyrotechnics on the Page, it is that we must remember the art of play. He notes, “It’s up to us to create conditions where students will want to play with language.“

Kevin Hodgson is a sixth grade teacher in Southampton, Massachusetts, and is the technology liaison with the Western Massachusetts Writing Project. Kevin blogs regularly at Kevin’s Meandering Mind and tweets more often than is healthy under his @dogtrax handle.