Build Strong Writers with Fun Lessons
and
Send Test Scores off the Charts!
with Barry Lane
DVD / VHS Combo w/Teacher's Guide
was $149 -
New Low Price: $49.00
DVD Only $99.00
with Teacher's Guide
New Low Price: $39.00
In the
aftermath of No Child Left Behind, schools and students are
judged and even funded by how well they perform on prompted
writing tests. In a questionable attempt to insure success, many
schools have adopted formulaic approaches to student writing
that drain enthusiasm for writing and cause test scores to
plateau at the mediocre level.
What
can we do? Barry Lane has the answer: Get Hooked
on Meaningand the
craft of real writing. In his DVD/VHS you will
find 12 simple lessons teachers can show directly to students,
grades 3-8, before the test. This material, and the entertaining
way it's presented, will improve both the attitude toward the
test and also teach aspects of the writers craft. Composed of
short, entertaining three minute segments and simple exercises,
and enhanced by a 120 page study guide filled with extra
lessons, posters, and overhead-ready examples, Barry Lane's
Hooked on Meaning is the perfect tool for incorporating prompted
tests into a meaning-based writing program. Show it
directly to your class or use it as a professional development
event for your faculty.
"We
used ideas from Hooked on Meaning with students who
had failed the South Carolina writing exam . The
next time they took the test they had a 100% pass
rate. Following Barry Lane’s lead, we didn’t teach
to the test, we taught the young writers craft, and
their writing performance soared."
Dr.
Janet Files, Director, Coastal Area Writing Project
South Carolina
Hooked
on Meaning comes in both VHS and DVD formats.
Video
Lessons with Barry include:
Using
all 5 senses at the farm:
Visit
the garage to find out that verbs are the engines of
sentences
Let
Barry and his puppy Snowflake teach you how to use
snapshots to improve beginnings and endings
Go
to the bank to learn about the importance of complete
sentences
Visit
the baseball diamond to learn about how to explode a
moment on a writing test
DVD
includes:
12
video chapters, with lessons to do with yourstudents
A
gallery slide show of student drawings of test scorers.
Advice
from Barry's 4th Grade teacher, Miss CarolynFoley
Bloopers
and out-takes from the video
Sourcebook includes:
Student
drawings of
test scorers
Lesson
Plans that support the video
Posters
to inspire writing
Photos
to inspire insightful writing
Code DVD G01
NEW!
Ba
Da Bing:
Creating Essay Writers
with Gretchen
DVD
/ CDROM
with
Gretchen Bernabei
$39.00
Gretchen Bernabei's intuitive approach to teaching the personal essay has revolutionized the way teachers teach the essay and transformed how students respond to writing prompts. In this dynamic 45 minute DVD video you will get a personal introduction to these power strategies from Gretchen herself and learn how to immediately implement them into your classroom. You will see Gretchen in action working with 4th graders, high school students and teachers and hear her personal tips for helping students write with voice and passion. You will also find downloadable lessons and student examples to use with your class. Lessons explored include:
Truisms and How to Teach Them
Ba Da Bing
(writing strong sentences)
The Kernal Essay
Playing with Text Structures
The 11 minute essay
Using Quick lists to Find Topics
Writing With Voice
"After I took Gretchen’s workshop my TAKS essay scores jumped form 44% passing to 76% passing in one week.”
~ Nika Maples, Grade 10, Texas
"Wow! I thought after countless hours of writing workshops and training, that I knew how to teach
writing! I was wrong! Gretchen showed me a whole bunch of new ways to teach writing to my 4th graders. I can’t wait to get back to school tomorrow."
~ Susie Jackson, 4th grade, San Antonio,
Texas
"Gretchen is awesome. Not only does she have great strategies for helping students become writers, she also has a great down to earth delivery. She brings it home and makes it real. I can’t wait to take it back.
~ Carla Blackwell, Grades 9 -12, Lavernia, Texas
Code:
SB050
Reviving
the Essay:
How to Teach Structure without Formula
by Gretchen Bernabei
Price: $25.00
Do
reading school essays put you to sleep? Inject new life
into essay writing and learn to teach structure without formula.
Gretchen Bernabei will wake up your students’ writing with
dozens of practical voice-building lessons that foster
structured prose without force-feeding formulas.
Testing
results confirm the need for students to unify their essays with
something internal.Victoria Young from the
Texas Education Agency explained that an essay is more focused
and coherent if its unifying theme is “one step away from the
prompt.” Students do understand what it means to locate
and identify one real belief, full of passion and experience,
from the prompt.And then sometimes, students
are given the freedom to dream up their own topic to develop
into a more focused thesis, assertion, or opinion.
The
many and varied lessons in Reviving the Essay help
students transform a prompt or a personal idea into something of
their own, something true and something that reflects they have
digested it, found the hard-earned truth in it, or the paradox
in it, or the human struggle within it.
In
20 years as a writing teacher in the Texas public school system,
Gretchen Bernabei has found that students need guided practice
in order to find a unifying message for their essay writings.They need guidance to develop a feel for more compelling
or interesting thoughts.Reviving the
Essay is her latest book for Discover Writing Press and one
that every teacher of writing and language arts will want to add
to their school bookshelf.
Bernabei
makes teaching essay writing fun again…for teacher and student
alike.Reviving the Essay
contains 30 exceptional lessons with motivating visual prompts,
and reproducible sections that include text, graphics, and
photos. Chapter headings begin with “Finding Your Message”,
and end with “Crafting the Essay for a Reader’s Ears.”
Lesson
names, some of which follow, reflect the variety, fun and depth
of this powerful teacher asset:
Truisms
Mixed
Feelings: The 52/49 Split
The
Insight Garden: Growing Opinions from Art, Literature and
Life
The
Story of My Thinking
Tevye’s
Debate
Sound
Effects
Dialogue
Ba-da-bing!
A Sentence-Imitating Exercise
I
Want to Show You Something
x
x
FREE
DOWNLOADS (PDF)
Handouts for Gretchen Bernabei's Seminar
One picture is worth a 1000 words
and this CD has 266 pictures to inspire thematic insight for
writing essays. Use in association with Ba Da Bing DVD and
Reviving the Essay to inspire your students, grades 3-12, to
find their writing voices. Perfect for your smart board or LCD
projector and a great companion to Reviving the Essay and Ba Da
Bing,
Code:
CD012
SPARKLERS
with CD
High
Scoring Test Essays and What they Teach us.
(160 pages)
Gretchen
Bernabei and Judy Reimer
Gretchen
Bernabei and Judy Reimer have collected high scoring student
test essays from 4th, 7th and 10 grades. Read these essays as
models for your students and try the 30 lessons Gretchen and
Judy have included to show your students that the best writing
is not formulaic and the best writers have something to say.
Code:
SB060
More Sparklers
(second edition)
High
Scoring Test Essays
and What They Teach Us
230 pages
by Gretchen Bernabei
and Judy Reimer
$25.00
In
this second volume of Sparklers you will find over 100 all new
top scoring test essays from 4th, 7th and High school
grades. Each essay is a writing craft lesson in
disguise. Use this book to model great prompted test
writing for your students. This second edition comes with
several essays in Spanish and an appendix of test taking
suggestions.
Code:
SB029
Why
We Must Run with Scissors Voice Lessons in Persuasive Writing, 290 pages
By
Barry Lane and Gretchen Bernabei
$26.00
Writing
powerful persuasive prose begins by stirring up voices deep
within the writer. As readers, we remember some of these voices
of passion, humor, hope and chutzpah. We forget all the
bureaucratic, jargon-filled position papers that mask real
voices with dead words pinned in paragraphs on the page. There
have been many great books on teaching the rhetoric of
persuasion, but few tackle the complex art of liberating the
dynamic voices of the student persuaders themselves. Why
We Must Run With Scissors-- Voice Lessons in Persuasive Writing
shows teachers how to approach persuasive writing from the
inside out, teaching not only the craft of persuasion, but also
the wild and crazy art that informs it.
Composed of 83
practical, classroom-ready lessons with examples of student
writing from grades 3 to 12, this unique and user-friendly
professional book provides teachers with an idea-packed
curriculum for sparking a class of creative and savvy
persuaders. Inside you will find lessons on:
Exploring your
personal persuasive power
Imagining your
audience
Finding
persuasion in all forms of literature
Mining
passionate opinions from the real world (fix size of dot)
Using humor and
parody to teach persuasion
Digging beneath
an entrenched position
Finding your own
distinct voice, even when writing to a uniform prompt
Dressing as the
Enemy
Crafting
beginnings and endings
Learning the
secrets of elaboration
Acing the state
persuasive writing test without ?. . .
Assessing our
arguments and efforts with sample student papers
Using rubrics
and other tools for student self-evaluation
..........and much,
much more.
About
the
Co-Authors:
Barry meets Gretchen in the checkout line at Walmart
and they decide to write a book.
Gretchen
Bernabei has taught persuasive writing at all grades and
currently teaches at O'Connor High School in San Antonio, Texas,
where she helps students pass the state writing test with fun
and mucho gusto. Her writing has appeared in Voices from the
Middle, and she presents workshops nationwide on voice
lessons in persuasive writing.
Reclaiming
the Essay for Students and Teachers
Soft cover 80 pages
by
Thomas Newkirk
foreword
by Barry Lane
$9.00
This
little book should be kept in the hip pocket of every English
Teacher who has ever thought there was a better way to teach
essay writing. Newkirk traces the origins of the boring school
essay and challenges teachers to try alternative structures.
NEW!
Crunch Time
(180 pages)
By Gretchen Bernabei,
Jayne Hover, & Cynthia Candler
“Our schools should be accountable, but do they have to
become joyless halls of drudgery? I’m not against measuring
student achievement and learning. But can’t we develop
lessons that use the best of what we know about learning and
about children, lessons informed by research and results,
lessons that include color, life, conversation and
laughter?” —Gretchen Bernabei
Crunchtime is a practical grab-and-go
resource for teachers.
Crunchtime strategies are engaging and fun
for students.
Crunchtime is especially effective in helping struggling
writers, including English
language learners.
In this eagerly-anticipated teacher resource, master
teachers Gretchen Bernabei, Jayne Hover, and Cynthia Candler
share writing lessons that are healthy for kids, promote
lifelong literacy, and, coincidentally, will help your
students blow the roof off of their state test scores.
Organized around the writing process—selecting topics,
crafting drafts, and polishing finished pieces—explicit
lessons engage student writers while shoring up the gaps
between learning and testing. Growing out of their own work
in Title I schools, Gretchen, Jayne, and Cynthia’s
strategies have proven to be especially effective in helping
ESL and special education students, not only pass the test,
but achieve commended performance. In addition to providing
classroom-tested strategies, this practical teaching
resource provides a wealth of crunchtime tools (rubrics,
reproducibles, and writing samples) minilessons, and lesson
plans that will help you teach strategically and position
your students for success on their state writing tests and
beyond.
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