The Stenhouse Blog

In this week’s One Thing You Might Try… blog, kindergarten teacher, Dawnavyn James, writes about blogging with her young students and how their self-directed use of the comments feature helped them to connect with each other’s ideas.

The following is a guest blog post from Maria Walther and Karen Biggs-Tucker, authors of the new book, The Literacy Workshop: Where Reading and Writing Converge.

When Maria and her first graders were immersed in the big idea of questioning, she read aloud the picture book, I Wonder (Holt, 2019). After enjoying this engaging book, she asked her learners, “Where do questions lead?” As you can see from her students’ responses on the chart, some smart thinking grew from this question.

In this One Thing You Might Try . . . post, kindergarten teacher, Katie Keier, offers a few ideas for maintaining the critical aspects of shared reading and writing during virtual learning and creating “Read it again!” moments for young learners—no matter what instructional setting you find yourself in.

"They already understood that reading and writing go hand in hand, we just needed to give them space and permission to try it out."

Maria Walther and Karen Biggs-Tucker are breaking tradition with their new book, The Literacy Workshop: Where Reading and Writing Converge. In this recent Teacher's Corner episode, they explain how they developed this idea, how it works in the classroom and remotely, and how their students responded.

It's the National Day on Writing® organized annually by the National Council of Teachers of English(NCTE)! And to help them celebrate we are aiming the spotlight on these wonderful titles that are packed with ideas on ways to enhance your writing instruction. Take a look.

Being a new teacher entering into the first year of teaching is always going to have its challenges. But this year? We're willing to bet that some trusted guidance is necessary. So since we can't be right there with you, we wanted to offer a list of new-teacher essentials that we think might help to have on your shelf for when you need advice from the experts. And while these books weren't written specifically for online instruction, the ideas can be applied in any setting should you find yourself teaching from home this fall.

Whether you’re headed into the classroom for the first time, or you’re finishing up your first year—you might find yourself looking for some trusted guidance from time to time. These Stenhouse authors have been where you are now, and since they can't be there in-person to answer your questions, they have done the next best thing and created these practical resources for you to reference when you need it.

When students make progress as writers, that progress is likely to spill over into other parts of their lives—both academic and personal. In order to be successful writers, however, students need to be connected to their writing, which might not be so easy to teach. Here are some resources from Stenhouse to give your writing instruction a boost and help your students find their voice and learn to love writing.

Below is excerpted from the Introduction in Patterns of Power: Inviting Young Writers into the Conventions of Language (2017) by Jeff Anderson and Whitney La Rocca. It’s a wonderful description—in the authors’ words—of what makes this authentic grammar and conventions instruction through the process of invitation so successful and how it’s used to bridge the gap left by current reading and writing curriculums.

By now, your reading and writing workshops are up and running. But are you noticing  there's something missing in your instruction that would bridge the two together? Jeff Anderson and Whitney La Rocca noticed that in their own instruction and they figured out a way to close the gap!  

In this video, hear from Jeff and Whitney about how taking just 5 minutes from reading workshop and 5 minutes from writing workshop each day, you can use their process known as the Invitational Process, or Patterns of Power Process, to strengthen your students’ comprehension and composition skills. Find out why this process works and how you can use it to create a space where students notice the beauty and meaning of writer’s craft in the texts they read and in the world around them.