The Write Thing

Help even your most reluctant writers to be motivated to write and encouraged to share their voices with others!

Imagine having a Newbery Medal-winning author in your classroom as a coach, an advisor, and a friend, giving you personal and practical advice on how to teach writing workshop in the 21st century classroom. With The Write Thing, you can do just that! Kwame Alexander is the New York Times-bestselling author of The Crossover. With more than 10 years of experience conducting writing workshops in schools, Alexander shows how to shake up the "traditional" writing workshop and make writing fun again! His magnetic personality, contagious enthusiasm, and pure love of teaching come through to affect-and infect!-all students. 

Part how-to and part inspiration, The Write Thing teaches you in step-by-step specificity how to move students from ideas, to drafts, to finished products, to published works. Not only will you successfully motivate your students to write, you'll take that motivation one step further by providing guidance on how to create student-driven publications of their work. When students write for a real purpose, the confidence they achieve when they see their writing legitimately published will be off the charts!

The book has three parts: Writing, Publishing, and Presenting. Writing features Lessons in Action that teach students to produce writing that is worthy of being published. With a focus on poetry, Alexander's writing workshop uniquely meets the needs of reluctant writers. Publishing focuses on how to prepare and print digital and physical copies of students' work. Presenting offers suggestions to help students confidently present their poetry and other written pieces.

With an insightful foreword by author Kylene Beers, other exciting features include Kwame Time! videos for both teachers and students that bring Alexander into the classroom. Kwame's Quick Tips feature easy-to-implement ideas that have worked for Alexander, and Solo Acts include success stories from teachers who have used his proven techniques. With a Balanced Literacy approach, The Write Thing is an indispensable resource that invigorates the writing workshop not just for students, but for teachers as well. 208 pages