How to Teach Writing Across The Curriculum

Now in an updated second edition How to Teach Writing Across the Curriculum: Ages 6-8 provides a range of practical suggestions for teaching non-fiction writing skills and linking them to children’s learning across the entire curriculum. Providing a number of suggestions for teachers and putting emphasis on creative approaches to teaching children writing in diverse and innovative ways, it provides:

Comprehensive, innovative, and practical, this text offers educators a powerful approach to teaching writing. Rather than have students perform repetitive exercises, it focuses on engaging students in grappling with words and experiences to make meaning. Such topics as the paradigm shift from product to process; an overview of the writing process; teaching prewriting and how to shape writing; examining genres; collaborative learning; classroom management strategies; grammar within the writing process; proofreading, editing, and publishing; cognitive developmental theory; developmental writing and spelling; brain theory; research; assessment and grading; the reading/writing connection; and writing across the curriculum are covered. Grades K-12.

American first-year college writing courses operate without a powerful context: they are designed to teach academic writing, but what kind of academic writing? Which of the many particular discourses, and, within those discourses, which recurring social situations? Lacking a clear context to refer to, textbook authors inevitably privilege form.