Sometimes big ideas are best taught simply. In Micro Lessons in Writing Jim Vopat makes the complex concepts of writing instruction easier for you and your students: one little lesson per page, one big idea. Micro Lessons may be small, but they're big on practicality, providing your instruction with grounding, direction, and flexibility. Try a few. You'll find these small lessons will enhance your thinking about teaching writing in big ways. Each of Vopat's seventy-five Micro Lessons introduces an important concept in writing and helps you give your students the space and opportunity to work with an idea, take risks, and examine the outcome with a discerning eye. These succinct, understandable lessons offer a rationale for teaching, clear instructions for seeing it through, and key questions and reflection points for joining with students to assess their work. The Micro Lessons are broken into three booklets: 
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<li>
Big Ideas for Getting Started helps you and your students create a classroom atmosphere that encourages writing, risk taking, and community. </li> <li>
Big Ideas for Revision focuses on specific conferencing and revision strategies that engage writers in improving their work. </li> <li>
Big Ideas for Editing and Publishing offers lessons in proofreading and finalizing written pieces - including ways to celebrate writing through publication. </li> </ul> The best writing contains equal elements allure, grace, and mystery. The best teaching of writing conveys the allure and grace but demystifies the process so that students can discover their own competence alongside a love of both process and product. With its minimal approach Micro Lessons in Writing will help you and your writers grapple with important concepts and practice vital techniques without losing sight of what makes writing a craft, an art, a passion, and a skill. Sometimes, less is more.

micro lessons in writing

Reference

Vopat, James

Words, Language & Grammar

Heinemann

Listen to a podcast with Jim Vopat and Harvey "Smokey" Daniels. "Ever wish there was a structure that let kids work collaboratively to generate writing topics, complete drafts, learn and practice positive ways of response, and develop published pieces? To give every kid in the class a feeling of success, a sense of what it means to be a writer? Writing Circles are here to grant those wishes." -Jim Vopat If literature circles work with your readers, Jim Vopat has exciting news: peer-led small groups are just as effective with writers. Read Writing Circles and find out how they: <ul>
<li>lead students from practice to progress as they write, respond, and lead one another toward better writing</li> <li>motivate and engage everyone through choice-including struggling writers and English learners</li> <li>develop voice and encourage risk-taking across genres</li> <li>rehabilitate the writing wounded and nurture growth through peer response-not critique</li> <li>make teaching more efficient by reducing the need for one-on-one conferring.</li> </ul>
Vopat helps you get started with circles and shows how they can help you achieve instructional goals. He includes step-by-step guidance for implementation and assessment, activities that make management smooth, and minilessons that scaffold growth in skills, topic selection, and craft. Writing Circles are a revolution, not an evolution, in writing workshop-the missing link between independent student writing and whole-group instruction.Try them with your students; give kids the space, safety, and support they need; and see why circles are as powerful for writers as they are for readers. "Writing Circles is that elusive something new under the sun, a genuine departure and an exciting step ahead. It's what's next. And it is also something big.... If you are already using literature circles or book clubs in your classroom, you will immediately see how fresh and engaging Writing Circles is." -Harvey "Smokey" Daniels Author of Mini-lessons for Literature Circles and Literature Circles, Second Edition

Writing Circles: Kids Revolutionize Workshop

What Makes Writing Good: A Multiperspective

What Makes Writing Good: A Multiperspective

Coles, William E., Jr.

Literature & Fiction

D.C. Heath & Co.

Involving parents in their children's schooling is a matter of intense concern in North America. Teachers and administrators want to construct a program that creates positive involvement. This is especially critical for Chapter I schools that are mandated to use a portion of their funds for home-and-school programs.
Jim Vopat believes that parental involvement should strengthen the link between home and school, and to achieve this goal parents need to be introduced to the revitalized school classroom. The Parent Project calls on the most powerful aspects of school reform--workshops, journals, cooperative groups, shared reading, agenda building, interviewing, goal setting, and critical thinking-classroom learning strategies experienced by children every day. When parents work with these strategies, they understand them and discover how to support them.
Using a workshop/process model, parents become involved with their children's classroom activities and are thus empowered to support their children's education. These workshops ensure participant ownership of a program's overall agenda while providing long-term structures for support and continued development.
The Parent Project:Provides a framework for implementing ways to get parents involved and informed.Was developed in urban bilingual school settings and includes workshop formats in Spanish and English.Is a complete source-book for teaches and principals that provides materials for conducting workshops with parents in areas of writing, reading, self-esteem, and community-building.Supports your efforts with a detailed description of what the workshop approach is and how it functions.

The Parent Project: A Workshop Approach to Parent Involvement

Education & Teaching

Schools & Teaching

Routledge

We all know how crucial family involvement at home and in school is to a child's academic success, yet how do we achieve it? In More Than Bake Sales James Vopat details proven ways of increasing parent involvement as well as providing the resource materials you will need to get started. With illustrative examples from a variety of elementary and middle schools, the opportunities for family-school collaboration include: over two dozen curriculum-based parent workshops in writing, reading, family and community history, ecology, education standards, and computer technology;a tested model for developing parent-teacher leadership in which leadership is accomplished by doing, not talking about doing;practical and proven strategies any teacher can use to strengthen the home-school connection (how about starting your own Roving Parent Journal?);community-building activities that establish trust and improve communication with parents; accessible resource materials, including research articles, read-alouds, a list of helpful national organizations, and reproducible workshop formats.More Than Bake Sales will help you increase parent involvement in your classroom and school in ways that support children's learning and academic success.

More Than Bake Sales: The Resource Guide for Family Involvement in Education

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Vopat, James. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Vopat, James

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Vopat, James. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

micro lessons in writing

Writing Circles: Kids Revolutionize Workshop

What Makes Writing Good: A Multiperspective

The Parent Project: A Workshop Approach to Parent Involvement

More Than Bake Sales: The Resource Guide for Family Involvement in Education