Joyful Writing in PreK contains 100 writing minilessons that spark creativity, imagination, and learning. Writing minilessons are brief, focused, explicit lessons that help children understand and expand on the characteristics of effective writing and nurture their ability to write with purpose, imagination and voice. Each minilesson engages children in inquiry that leads to the discovery of a general principle from The Literacy Continuum.
This module is designed to support PreK and Kindergarten students’ foundational skills development with a collection of short, engaging videos featuring TCRWP Staff Developers speaking directly to learners. One set of videos focuses on supporting children’s knowledge of High Frequency Words (i.e. “look,” “how,” “because”), and another set of videos supports children’s phonological awareness.
This module supports first grade students’ foundational skills development with a collection of short, engaging videos featuring TCRWP Staff Developers speaking directly to learners. One set of videos focuses on supporting student’s phonological awareness, while another set of videos supports children’s knowledge of High Frequency Words (i.e. “look,” “how,” “because”).
In this series of videos, children join a reading partner—a Staff Developer from TCRWP—to work through texts that present progressively greater challenges with decoding, comprehension, and fluency. As the two read together as partners, the Staff Developer coaches the child to gradually take on harder challenges. This series of videos will provide children with the companionship and coaching that they need, while also modelling warm, supportive, fun ways that parents and teachers can read side-by-side with children.
In this sequence of videos, staff developers from Columbia University’s Teachers College Reading and Writing Project coach individual writers to generate ideas for a nonfiction book, and to work through the process of writing that book. Writing well requires a knowledge of the topic, so students are guided to write about topics of personal expertise (i.e. basketball). However, if they have studied a topic deeply (i.e. The American Revolution) this coaching can help them write well about those topics, too.
In an introductory series of 9 video-lessons, students learn a host of engaging and thoughtful ways to jot responses to their fiction reading. Then, in a second series with 10 videos, students take all the writing and thinking about reading they did in the first, and fashion that writing into a well-structured literary essay. As they do this important work, students deepen their understanding of writing literary essays about texts, and all that this process entails.
The Up the Ladder Writing Virtual Teaching Resources subscription includes virtual teaching resources to pair with the print units (note that you MUST have the Up the Ladder Writing print units to activate your virtual subscription). These units are designed to move students repeatedly through the writing process while rapidly accelerating their progress. You’ll find that students come out of the units feeling accomplished and confident as writers. These powerful units equip intermediate grades writers with the skills they need to enter into and succeed with the grade-level writing units.
