Writing About Reading: From Book Talk to Literary Essays, Grades 3-8

Want to know how to teach students to think and write powerfully about texts? Read this remarkable book now. You'll be glad you did. - Carl Anderson, author of How's It Going? What sets Writing About Reading apart is that Janet Angelillo shows us how to move children beyond the rich conversations and unpolished writing they do to capture their thinking, and into clear, articulate writing about their thinking about reading. - Katie Wood Ray, author of What You Know by Heart This must-have book will enable teachers to develop their students' ability to use authentic writing tasks to deepen what they know and understand about their reading. - Laura Robb, author of Literacy Links and Redefining Staff Development Janet Angelillo introduces us to an entirely new way of thinking about writing about reading. She shows us how to teach students to manage all the thinking and questioning that precedes their putting pen to paper. More than that, she offers us smarter ways to have students write about their reading that can last them a lifetime. She demonstrates how students' responses to reading can start in a notebook, in conversation, or in a read aloud lead to thinking guided by literary criticism reflect deeper text analysis and honest writing processes result in a variety of popular genres--book reviews, author profiles, commentaries, editorials, and the literary essay. She even includes tools for teachingday-by-day units of study, teaching points, a sample minilesson, and lots of student examplesplus chapters on yearlong planning and assessment. Ensure that your students will be readers and writers long after they leave you. Get them enthused and empowered to use whatever they readfacts, statistics, the latest book--as fuel for writing in school and in their working lives. Read Angelillo.