Write Beside Them: Risk, Voice, and Clarity in High School Writing by Penny Kittle

Write Beside Them: Risk, Voice, and Clarity in High School Writing by Penny Kittle

Pages: Paperback, 272 pages

Publisher: May 9th 2008 by Heinemann

Write Beside Them debuts as the field's most comprehensive, contemporary, and practical book on high school writing. Kittle not only tells how a skillful writing teacher operates, she shows you on the accompanying DVD, with clips of kids at work in every stage of a writing workshop. And all this glorious teaching happens with real, sometimes struggling kids who remind us of our own classrooms and students. Write Beside Them is the whole package.

- Harvey Daniels Author of Content-Area Writing and Subjects Matter

What makes the single biggest difference to student writers? When the invisible machinery of your writing processes is made visible to them. Write Beside Them shows you how to do it. It's the comprehensive book and DVD that English/language arts teachers need to ensure that teens improve their writing. Across genres, Penny Kittle presents a flexible framework for instruction, the theory and experience to back it up, and detailed teaching information to help you implement it right away. Each section of Write Beside Them describes a specific element of Kittle's workshop:

- Daily writing practice: writer's notebooks and quick writes

- Instructional frameworks: minilessons, organization, conferring, and sharing drafts

- Genre work: narrative, persuasion, and writing in multiple genres

- Skills work: grammar, punctuation, and style

- Assessment: evaluation, feedback, portfolios, and grading.

All along the way, Kittle demonstrates minilessons that respond to students' immediate needs, and her Student Focus sections profile and spotlight how individual writers grew and changed over the course of her workshop. In addition, Write Beside Them provides a study guide, reproducibles, writing samples from Penny and her students, suggestions for nurturing your own writing life, and a helpful FAQ. Best of all, the accompanying DVD takes you right inside Penny's classroom. Its video clips explicitly model how to make the process of writing accessible to all kids. Penny Kittle's active coaching and can-do attitude alone will energize your teaching and inspire you to write with your students. But her strategies, expert advice, and compelling in-class video footage will help you turn inspiration into great teaching. Read Write Beside Them and discover that the most important influence for all young writers is their teacher.

This book has completely pumped me up for teaching writing next year! So many books are out there with great information, but I found Penny’s to be the best fit for me. I think it is because she is a lot like me in her teaching style and beliefs. I LOVED that I was able to see her in action with her students and see how her first day of the workshop goes. So many of the great books on Writing Workshops out there are geared to the elementary school level and not to middle and high school and Penny has done an amazing job at showing how her Writing Workshop works in her classroom. This book will definitely be referenced many times over the coming years.

Thank you Penny for such a great resource and thank you Ruth for this recommendation!

"Believe any kid can learn, no matter how far behind and how resistant; try in as many ways as possible to connect and teach; love each student unconditionally with the patience and faith it takes to see it through."

- Penny Kittle

In My Mailbox (22)

Thanks as always to Kristi at The Story Siren for this little MME! May you all have a happy Memorial Day and remember to thank those who are serving our country so that we can read what we want and blog all about it! I love you Jimmy-man!

This is my baby-cuz Jimmy and Kylie... Semper Fi!

Bought:
(for the blog)
Sisters Red by Jackson Pearce
Angel Star by Jennifer Murgia
Columbine by Dave Cullen

(for my classroom)
Mechanically Inclined by Jeff Anderson
My Quick Writes: For Inside Writing by Donald H. Graves and Penny Kittle
Inside Writing: How to Teach the Details of Craft by Donald H. Graves and Penny Kittle
In the Middle: New Understanding about Writing, Reading, and Learning by Nancie Atwell
Launching the Writing Workshop by Denise Leograndis

** Don't think I have a ton of money... LOL! I love ebay and have found most of these DIRT cheap!

For Review:
Insatiable by Meg Cabot

The Tension of Opposites by Kristina McBride

I told you I would get this out today!! Happy release day (again) Kristina!!

The Tension of Opposites by Kristina McBride

Genre: YA Fiction

Pages: Hardcover, 288 pages

Publisher: EgmontUSA May 25th 2010

It’s been two years since Noelle disappeared. Two years since her bike was discovered, sprawled on a sidewalk. Two years of silence, of worry, of fear.

For those two long years, her best friend Tessa has waited, living her own life in a state of suspended animation. Because how can she allow herself to enjoy a normal high school life if Noelle can’t? How dare she have other friends, go to dances, date boys, without knowing what happened to the girl she thought she would share everything with?

And then one day, someone calls Noelle’s house. She’s alive.

A haunting psychological thriller taken straight from the headlines, The Tension of Opposites is a striking debut that explores the emotional aftermath of a kidnapping on the victim, and on the people she left behind.

This has to be one of my new favorite YA books. McBride has done an amazing job with this debut and I can’t pump it up enough. I felt like I was with Tessa the entire novel through every step of what she was going through. She is a completely believable character and I loved hearing the story from the best friends’ perspective. Often times we forget that there are others left behind who are just as hurt when someone disappears as the family and McBride has done a phenomenal job describing Tessa’s emotions, struggles, and trials that she went through with Noelle’s disappearance and re-emersion into society.

The book definitely lived up to my expectations and I am so glad that I took it on as part of my challenge. It had both light and dark elements and I loved that McBride took those issues head on and didn’t sugar coat them. They were addressed in a way that teens (and adults) can relate to and need to read that raw emotion and truth about what Noelle went through. The dialogue was spot on when it comes to teens and how they talk to each other, deal with issues (or avoid them) and the dialogue between characters. Of course, I think being a teacher had a little something to do with that.

I couldn’t have been more pleased with this novel and could not put it down. It was so very well written and unlike anything (plot wise) I have ever read. Run, don’t walk, to the bookstore and get Kristina McBride’s debut novel today!!

Happy Realease Day Kristina McBride!!

I am so excited for Kristina today! This is her debut novel and I am so pumped about it. As a teacher, she inspires me to keep writing and lets me know that I can do it too! I am currently reading her AMAZING book The Tension of Opposites (will probably be done today and will post the review up as soon as I finish) and can't wait for you to read it too. This is one that I am reading for the Debut Author Challenge as well. Here is a little blurb about the book and the trailer. Again...

HAPPY RELEASE DAY KRISTINA!

It’s been two years since Noelle disappeared. Two years since her bike was discovered, sprawled on a sidewalk. Two years of silence, of worry, of fear.

For those two long years, her best friend Tessa has waited, living her own life in a state of suspended animation. Because how can she allow herself to enjoy a normal high school life if Noelle can’t? How dare she have other friends, go to dances, date boys, without knowing what happened to the girl she thought she would share everything with?

And then one day, someone calls Noelle’s house. She’s alive.

A haunting psychological thriller taken straight from the headlines, The Tension of Opposites is a striking debut that explores the emotional aftermath of a kidnapping on the victim, and on the people she left behind.

Angel Star Giveaway

Found this via The Book Butterfly and just wanted to tell you guys about a great contest. Fantastic Book Review is giving away an amazing Angel Star gift package--It includes a SIGNED ARC of the book, bookmarks, signed bookplates, octagram pendant,and a silver prayer box.

Good luck!




Here is a little more on Angel Star by Jennifer Murgia...

Seventeen-year-old Teagan McNeel falls for captivating Garreth Adams and soon discovers that her crush has an eight-point star etched into the palm of his right hand-the mark of an angel.

But where there is light, dark follows, and she and Garreth suddenly find themselves vulnerable to a dark angel's malicious plan that could threaten not only her life, but the lives of everyone she knows, and now, she is torn between one angel's sacrifice and another angel's vicious ambition.

Divinely woven together, Angel Star takes readers on a reflective journey when one angel's sacrifice collides with another angel's vicious ambition in a way that is sure to have readers searching for their own willpower

.