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Cascade Celebrates Writing |
Two years ago, Sarah Burhop, our fifth and sixth grade teacher shared Lucy Calkins' Units of Study, an exciting writing program, with Cascade Canyon. The program, based on a writing workshop model, came out of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project from Columbia University. Last year, Cascade Canyon teachers collaborated to fully implement the writing workshop schoolwide, and have reported tremendous results. Cascade students sound like authors as they respond to each others' work and thoughtfully revise their own writing; students overtly love writing; and teachers are enjoying writing with their students.
Lucy Calkins is a Professor in Curriculum and Instruction at Teachers College, Columbia University, the Director of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, and a celebrated author, speaker and primary education specialist. In Units of Study, Lucy Calkins emphasizes teaching the writer - rather than teaching writing - by creating a classroom of writers who support and celebrate each others’ work. Teacher-delivered mini-lessons help students learn the craft of writing in distinct genres. Students practice using the writing process, emulating what authors do.
Nancie Atwell’s work on creating a writing workshop with middle school students has helped Cascade Canyon tailor the writing workshop for our 5-6th and 7-8th grade classrooms. Nancie Atwell teaches seventh-and eighth-grade writing, reading, and history at the Center for Teaching and Learning, a K-8 demonstration school she founded in Edgecomb, Maine, in 1990. Nancie Atwell was the first classroom teacher to receive the NCTE David H. Russell Award and the MLA Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize for distinguished research in the teaching of English.
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