Teaching Students to Write Effective Essays: Meaningful, Step-by-Step Lessons That Get Students Ready for Writing Assessments

Teaching Students to Write Effective Essays provides an easy to use system to prepare students for writing assessments. It contains detailed lessons on everything from the persuasive essay to poem analysis and AUTHENTIC student examples. In Chapter 10, titled "Arts Review" Ms. Pryle includes a step-by-step approach to writing reviews of cds, movies, plays, and concerts. Her pre-writing questions are very detailed. "Did the scenery[at the concert] add to the music or detract? Did the lead singer connect with the crowd? How?" Mini- lessons or even whole chapters are ready to be photocopied and presented to the class with little or no adjusting. I believe what makes this book unique is its inclusion of reproducible REAL student examples from Ms. Pryle's classes. Students seem more receptive to a new assignment when they see examples of other students that have successfully completed that very same assignment. Finally, not only is the book a great tool to breathe a little creativity into one's lessons, it's so detailed that the assignments would be ideal lesson plans to copy for substitutes, especially in an emergency or extended teacher absence. What a great tool!

This book is fantastic! I have been using the lessons with my middle school students. Ms. Pryle discusses writing and what works with middle school students. She is a former middle school writing teacher and has clearly used these ideas and lessons herself. So many times I read a book that has great ideas and theories, but do not have the time to extract those ideas and create lessons, plans etc. This book have a perfect blend of both clear ideas, step by step instructions, and ready to use resources. Ms. Pryle explains each assignment, and then provides the teacher with reproducable checklists for the kids, mini-lessons, and student examples of the finished product.

This book would also work well in all subject areas, not just language arts. The book has instructions for a "Process (how to) Essay" (great for science or pracical arts!) a "Compare and Contrast Essay, "a "Persuasive Essay," an "Arts Review," and a "Letter for Social Change," among others. These types of assignments would be great for social studies, science, and many other subject areas. I highly recommend this book!