Teaching Writing: Balancing Process and Product by Gail Tompkins

From the Publisher

Teaching Writing: Balancing Process and Product continues to be the definitive book on how to teach writing in grades K-8, as it is the only text with comprehensive coverage of both process and product.

• NEW! Teacher's Notes: Supporting Struggling Writers are special features that help teachers adapt chapter content specifically for struggling students.
• NEW! Teacher's Notes: Assisting English Language Learners point out the best ways for teachers to support these student writers.
• Vignettes open every chapter to illustrate how real teachers have used the chapter content in their elementary classrooms.
• Minilessons in every chapter model skills and strategies instruction for use in the classroom.
• NEW! Instructional Previews help ground readers in chapter content, best addressing the question of what to teach and when.
• Step-by-Step features clearly illustrate instructional procedures.
• Rubrics throughout chapters help readers address and clarify assessment issues.
• NEW! A Descriptive Writing chapter addresses descriptive writing as a specific genre as well as an essential component of narrative writing, poetic writing, and other genres.

Product Details

• Table of Contents
• Forewords & Introductions

Table of Contents

Forewords & Introductions

Teaching Writing: Balancing Process and Product continues to be the definitive book on how to teach writing, as it is the only text with comprehensive coverage of both process and product. This is because I understand that teachers in kindergarten through eighth grade must balance the attention paid to both the process that children use as they write and the quality of their compositions.

Overview of the Fourth Edition

My new edition focuses on writing process, collaborative learning, reading and writing connections, writing genres, and writing across the curriculum. The text provides practical strategies for teaching and assessing writing—with step-by-step directions—presenting more than 100 student samples to illustrate the teaching strategies.

This edition is divided into two parts. The first part, "Process and Product," focuses on the writing process that children use as they write and on ways to assess children's writing.

Readers will learn about the stages in the writing process—involving prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing—and how to teach elementary students to use these stages as a recursive cycle when they write during writing workshop, literature focus units, and thematic units. Readers will also learn how to teach students to develop ideas, organize their writing, choose vocabulary, apply stylistic devices, and correct mechanical errors in order to create high-quality compositions.

The second part, "Writing Genres," includes chapters on eight writing forms: journal writing, letter writing, descriptive writing, biograpical writing, expository writing, narrativewriting, poetic writing, and persuasive writing. At the beginning of each chapter, I delineate an instructional sequence with goals and activities for teaching each genre in kindergarten through eighth grade.

I emphasize five levels of composition instruction that vary according to how much scaffolding the teacher provides: modeled writing, shard writing, interactive writing, guided writing, and independent writing. Through this sequence, teachers vary the amount of support they provide student writers, and students increasingly assume more responsibility for their own writing.

Special Features of the Fourth Edition

These features increase the effectiveness of this text and provide support for teachers as they teach writing, encourage students to assume more responsibility for using the writing process, and assess the quality of students' finished products.

• NEW! Teacher's Notes: Supporting Struggling Writers are special features that help teachers adapt chapter content specifically for struggling students.
• NEW! Teacher's Notes: Assisting English Language Learners point out the best ways for teachers to support these student writers.
• Vignettes open every chapter to illustrate how real teachers have used the chapter content in their elementary classrooms.
• Minilessons in every chapter model skills and strategies instruction for use in the classroom.
• NEW! Instructional Previews help ground readers in chapter content, best addressing the question of what to teach and when.
• Step-by-Step features clearly illustrate instructional procedures.
• Rubrics throughout chapters help readers address and clarify assessment issues.
• NEW! A Descriptive Writing chapter addresses descriptive writing as a specific genre as well as an essential component of narrative writing, poetic writing, and other genres.