Smuggling Writing

Is it possible to sneak more writing into your already-jammed curriculum? Yes! With this cache of classroom-tested ideas, you have all you need to make writing-to-learn a daily habit for students that deepens their content understanding and creates learners ready to take on all of the world’s information.

Smuggling Writing shows how to integrate writing seamlessly into your lesson plans with 32 written response activities that help students process information and ideas in short, powerful sessions. The authors invigorate time-tested tools like GIST, Herringbone, and Anticipation Guides, and organize them into sections on Vocabulary and Concept Development, Comprehension, Discussion, and Research & Inquiry so you can select and use them to maximum effect.

Here are the success-ensuring how-to’s that accompany each strategy:

• A step-by-step process ensures students use the strategy before, during, and after reading/learning so they “own” the strategy and can track their thinking
• Engaging digital applications, including Story Impression with Bubbl.us, Reading Road Map with Prezi, Possible Solutions with Padlet, CLVG with Brain Pop
• Sample lessons showing both traditional and online formats, taking the guess work out of trying these new digital tools
• Ideas for “smuggling” additional writing opportunities into or after the lessons, ensuring that students’ writing skills improve
• Connections to Common Core State Standards

With all the heady talk of what it’s going to take for students to read, write, and analyze across multiple sources, it’s nice to know that there is a book that shows how big gains will come from “writing small” day by day.

· Includes 30+ process-oriented literacy strategies in the areas of vocabulary and concept development, comprehension, research and inquiry, and discussion

· Provides a quick-reference matrix that shows, at a glance, each strategy, its associated “literacy strand,” relevant digital tools, sample lesson details, and related standards

· Structures the strategies in such a way that they can be used as metacognitive tools for teachers and students to use in learning across all areas of the curriculum

· Demonstrates how to seamlessly integrate writing into your lessons while simultaneously teaching content—any content—from math to science to social studies to literature

· Presents strategies in a scaffolded manner to help students think about, process, read and recall from varied sources—both traditional and digital

· Breaks each strategy down clearly into instructional phases: prereading, reading, and postreading

· Illustrates how the strategies can be used with and applied to many forms of both informational and narrative text

· Shows how teachers can model instruction for students through whole-class instruction and discussion and then transfer that to small groups and pairs of students who work collaboratively

· Includes digital applications, “smuggling writing” tips, standards-based connections, and samples lessons for the strategies