One-Day Workshop:
Lessons That Change Writers, Grades 5-9

Presented by Nancie Atwell

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Overview

Readers of Nancie Atwell's bestseller In the Middle know that her students are famous for exceptional writing -- literary, skillful, passionate memoirs, stories, poems, and essays. That's no accident. Good writing can be taught and learned.

In this workshop, based on her book Lessons That Change Writers, Nancie focuses on the mini-lesson, the powerful, whole-group meeting that begins each day's writing workshop and has much to do with the quality of the student writing produced there.

Nancie will share dozens of the lessons her students cited as those that changed them as writers -- advice, models, activities, and language that kids can understand and put to work in their writing. These relevant, practical approaches helped her students become more engaged, more productive, and more purposeful writers, not to mention achieve publication and recognition beyond their classroom and school.

When large class size makes daily, individual writing conferences an impossibility, Nancie will also show how to make mini-lessons work as whole-group writing conferences.

As with all of Nancie's work, the emphasis of the day is on practicality. She is a classroom teacher, and the workshop is packed with examples, methods, and ideas developed over twenty years of teaching writing in a workshop. Four types of lessons will be demonstrated:

• Lessons about topics: ways to develop ideas for pieces of writing that matter to and impel young writers;
• Lessons about principles: ways to think and craft deliberately and create literature;
• Lessons about genres: ways to help kids observe, name, and internalize the qualities of good poems, essays, short stories, memoirs, book reviews, and humor writing; and
• Lessons about conventions: Language and examples that help students understand how marks, forms, and spelling function to give writing power and make reading possible.

Nancie has fine-tuned the role of the mini-lesson in writing workshop to support all writers as they identify problems, solve them, and take charge of their writing and thinking. The qualities of good writing are complex and nuanced, and they can be taught and learned. This workshop is for any educator who cares about excellent writing and wants to make excellence possible for every student writer.

Outline of the Day

1. Basic rules, routines, and expectations for writing workshop: a review
   • Rules and expectations that support and nurture writers and writing
   • The structure of a daily writing workshop
   • Mini-lessons basics, including materials for lessons and the writing handbook
2. Lessons about topics
   • Ways to help kids develop fresh, meaningful ideas for their memoirs, poems, short stories, and essays -ideas they're eager to write about and motivated to craft as literature
3. Lessons about principles
   • Examples of the literary qualities, and the language that describes them, that have most changed Nancie's kids: the Rule of So What?, the Rule of Write About a Pebble, Make a Movie Behind your Eyelids, the Rule of Thoughts and Feelings, Polishing, and more
4. Lessons about genres
   • Which genres are worth teaching in grades 5-9
   • How to use examples of published and student writing to help kids go inside a genre and learn its qualities
   • Effective memoirs
   • How free verse poetry works
   • Fiction: a course of study
   • Gifts of writing
   • Effective book reviews
   • Essays: a course of study
5. Lessons about conventions
   • Which conventions are worth teaching in grades 5-9
   • How to help kids take responsibility for skills
   • How to set up a spelling program that works
   • Essential punctuation information
   • Convention confusions that kids want to clear up

Who should attend?

Teachers of grades 5-9, administrators, curriculum coordinators, and staff developers.

TIME

8:30 A.M.-3:00 P.M.

TUITION

The cost of this workshop is $219.00 per person. If you register 3 or more participants at the same time the cost is $209.00 per person.