writing for grade 7

Don Deschler does some really good stuff on writing for adolescents—assumes 5th grade reading level, or used to, though. You can’t just buy most of the books—must do the seat time at workshops for $300-400 each.

Terry Jennings has some nice stuff that I’ve gotten at conferences—I use it to teach paragraph writing. Covers both expository or narrative. Not sure that she’s published it, though. She came out to the midwest to do a one-day workshop for teachers. She is awesome. If you ever have a chance to go to Landmark and see her—do. They have many, many fine folks. You might email Landmark and see what they have.

So many kids cannot really write a sentence or paragraph. They need those skills before writing full papers, I think.

Susan,

Isn’t Landmark the school for dyslexics?

nt

Students with learning disabilities and dyslexia. They tend to go for more of the language-based LD than the NVLD types—or at least used to a few years ago.

Sopris West puts out a program called Step Up to Writing that is fantastic for any age. My LD students went from not being able to write a sentence to writing a 3-5 page research paper and passing their state tests in a year. I highly recommend it. We are using it in our regular ed classrooms in high school.