Gretchen Bernabei

Judi Reimer

Put text structures to work and soon your students will be writing happily ever after. Award-winning authors Gretchen Bernabei and Judi Reimer make teaching to write about abstract concepts easy and fun. Thirty-five lessons centered on classic fairy tales give students the focused practice they need to produce effective analytical writing on demand—and in any situation. Designed to be used by students of all ages, each lesson includes a writing prompt and a planning framework that leads students to organize writing through a text structure. With practice, students move from dependency on teacher guidance to becoming autonomous designers of their own analytical writing.

Truisms That Help Students Write About Abstract Concepts . . . and Live Happily Ever After, Grades 4-12

Text Structures From Fairy Tales

Kayla Briseño

Use Nonfiction Picture Books for Lively, High-Impact Lessons That Inspire Student Reading, Writing, and Response Want to make an unbelievable story utterly irresistible to young readers? Make sure the story’s true. Nonfiction, like poetry, can have a bad reputation for being boring, but in the hands of able picture book authors, it’s anything but. In Text Structures From Nonfiction Picture Books, elementary and middle grade teachers can channel the curiosity piqued from amazing true tales to help students further their reading comprehension and writing skills. With the bite-sized format of nonfiction picture books as a starting point, this practical book shares over 40 low-prep, quick-access lessons to get students reading, writing, and responding to nonfiction texts with ease. The book provides a wealth of instruction, including: Step-by-step lessons with multiple ways to use each picture book to prompt students’ writing and analysis of the text An extensive list of nonfiction picture book titles organized by "books about people," "books about places," "books about things," and "books about animals" Topics, text structures, and writer’s craft moves provided for each book Lessons that introduce kernel essays, truisms, and reading response Embedded terms, examples, and assignments to teach the vocabulary of writer’s craft including refrain, polysyndeton, antithesis, and more! Based on master writing teacher Gretchen Bernabei’s instructional model, the lessons offer a lively, high-impact mix of reading aloud, discussion, modeling, student writing, and peer share. Plus, readers have access to a complete companion website full of text structure reproducibles, reading response prompts, additional lessons and extensions, student samples, and links to demo videos.

Lessons to Ease Students Into Text Analysis, Reading Response, and Writing With Craft

Text Structures From Nonfiction Picture Books

Laura Van Prooyen

Poetry is a joyful art form, but how do you teach students to joyfully read, analyze, and write poems? In Text Structures from Poetry, Grades 4-12, award-winning educator Gretchen Bernabei teams up with noted poet Laura Van Prooyen to light the path. Centered around 50 classroom-proven lesson and poem pairs, the mentor texts represent a broad range of voices in contemporary poetry and the canon. These unique and engaging lessons show educators how to "pop the hood" on a poem to discover what makes it work, using text structures to unlock the engine of a poem. This method enables educators to engage students in reading and re-reading a poem closely, to identify how the parts of the poem relate to each other to create movement, and to leverage what they have learned to write their own evocative poems. Each of the 50 lessons includes a mentor poem that serves as an excellent model for young writers, a diagram that illustrates the text structure of the poem, and several inspiring examples of student poems written to emulate the mentor poem. Easy-to-use instructional resources enhance instructor and student understanding and include: Teaching notes for unlocking the text structure of a poem and the engine that makes it work. Tips for exploring rhyme scheme, meter, and fixed forms. Instructional sequences that vary the ways students can read and write poems and other prose forms. Ideas for revising and publishing student poems. A "Meet the Contemporary Authors" section that includes fascinating messages from the contemporary poets. Teach your students to learn about poetry using the magic of poems themselves and lead the way to a rewarding love of poetry for teachers and students alike.

Lessons to Help Students Read, Analyze, and Create Poems They Will Remember

Text Structures From Poetry, Grades 4-12

Barry Lane

For use in schools and libraries only. These 83 classroom-ready lessons provide teachers with an idea-packed curriculum for sparking a class of creative, savvy persuaders.

Voice Lessons in Persuasive Writing 3-12

Why We Must Run With Scissors

If reading school essays puts you to sleep, Gretchen Bernabei's REVIVING THE ESSAY will wake up your students' writing in ways even they never dreamed of. This exciting new resource for students and teachers provides 30 delightful lessons and activities that will awaken all of the senses, challenging and cajoling, stirring and stimulating even the most reluctant writer. Chapter headings such as "Finding your Message," "Finding or Inventing your Structure," "Experimenting with Thick Description," and "Crafting the Essay for a Reader's Ears" quickly reveals the substance and scope of this inventive approach to teaching a form that dates back to Montaigne. Bernabei uses a number of examples, visual prompts and verbal generators to engage students in thinking about every side of a subject.

How to Teach Structure Without Formula

Reviving the Essay

Your best offense against the state assessments No matter what state you teach in, you can be certain that grammar is being tested . . . frequently and across the grades! The biggest issue? Most of our grades 4-12 students continue to make the same old errors year after year. Grammar Keepers to the rescue, with 101 lessons that help students internalize the conventions of correctness once and for all. Bernabei’s key ingredients include Daily journal writing to increase practice and provide an authentic context Minilessons and Interactive Dialogues that model how to make grammatical choices A “Keepers 101” sheet to track teaching and “Parts of Speech Sheet” for student reference

Lessons That Tackle Students' Most Persistent Problems Once and for All, Grades 4-12

Grammar Keepers

Jennifer Koppe

Text Structures from the Masters provides 50 short texts written by famous Americans driven by what Peter Elbow described as “an itch” to say something. By examining the structure of these mentor texts, students see that they too have an “itch” and learn how to use the text structure of each document to express it. Each 4-page lesson includes: A planning sheet that shows the structure of the mentor text Brainstorming boxes A method for “kernelizing” (outlining) their own essay Student examples

50 Lessons and Nonfiction Mentor Texts to Help Students Write Their Way In and Read Their Way Out of Every Single Imaginable Genre, Grades 6-10

Text Structures From the Masters

Gretchen Bernabei and Judi Reimer present 95 craft lessons based on real student essays. The premise of the book is that "kids learn from each other faster and more deeply than they learn from us." These real tests are an "instructional gold mine" for modeling narrative, argument, and analytical writing techniques. These are the main kinds of writing taught, tested, and even outlined in the Common Core Standards. An innovative, fun, and easy-to-use resource for teachers looking to improve their writing instruction.

Gretchen Bernabei

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