Getting Started: The Reading-Writing Workshop, Grades 4-8

  Whether you're new to the classroom or merely new to the reading-writing workshop, Getting Started is the concise primer you're looking for that will help you implement these powerful teaching frameworks. Workshop teaching is simple, research based, and rewarding for you and your students. It can be launched by any teacher in any type of classroom, and Getting Started shows you the doable strategies for planning, organizing, teaching, and reflecting that make the workshop so effective. Linda Ellis and Jamie Marsh provide smart, practical advice about working with readers and writers of varying levels - including struggling students - differentiating your instruction to support everyone's needs, and helping diverse groups of children move toward a single classroom-wide goal of improved literacy. Ellis and Marsh strip the workshop down to its most vital parts and offer you straight-ahead techniques for reading and writing, including:

• reading aloud
• implementing independent reading
• conferring with readers
• working with struggling readers 
• conducting writing minilessons
• conferring with writers
• sharing students' work.

With valuable one-on-one instructional strategies, examples of student work, forms, checklists, and other tools, Getting Started includes everything you need to launch your workshop, to better understand your students' literacy needs, and to give them the support they deserve.