First Grade Writers: Units of Study to Help Children Plan, Organize, and Structure Their Ideas

What readers will love about this book is that it offers big-picture understandings of teaching, then it zooms in and offers the details of that teaching.
--Katie Wood Ray, author of About the Authors

First graders have no shortage of ideas. The hard part for them is putting thoughts together into a cohesive draft. Organizing and planning for writing defy simple description and aren't easily modeled for students, making them challenging topics to convey to young children. Where do you find the language and tactics to teach these subtle processes?

With First Grade Writers, Stephanie Parsons will change how you think about teaching the thinking behind writing. Parsons outlines five specific units of study for your writing workshop that help students prepare thoughtfully to write. Beginning with a September unit specially designed to introduce the writing workshop to first graders and build a classroom community that supports risk taking and learning, each successive unit builds upon the previous one and fosters independence. By June your students will know how to plan for writing out loud and on paper, leading to elegant, well-structured pieces. The units also help children to differentiate the planning and organization needed to write:

• fiction
• personal narrative
• nonfiction Q & A books
• pattern books.

Best of all, First Grade Writers is corner-of-the-desk practical with concise, logically laid-out descriptions of how each unit of study operates, a variety of helpful tables, charts, and assessment diagnostics, as well as elaborations, teaching points for minilessons and conferences, troubleshooting tips, and month-by-month planning assistance.

If you're new to first grade, Stephanie Parsons will give you ideas for top-notch teaching that will be invaluable as you establish your first writing workshop. If you're a veteran, the units in First Grade Writers will augment your existing workshop and help your students clearly conceptualize what high-quality writing looks like. Either way, you'll help them write better by thinking about the thinking behind good writing.

For many years as the author of bestselling Heinemann books such as About the Authors, Study Driven, Already Ready, and In Pictures and In Words, and as a member of Heinemann's Professional Development Services, Katie Wood Ray gave teachers resources and PD that transformed writing instruction and helped children discover a lifelong love of writing.

In 2014, Katie "moved to the other side of the desk" and joined the dynamic team of editors at Heinemann where she works closely with authors to craft powerful professional books on a range of literacy topics. Katie is also the series editor for the new Classroom Essentials books from Heinemann. Tasked with bringing foundational, progressive practices to a new generation of teachers, Katie works to ensure that the sharp focus and enhanced design of each book best serve the content. She also teamed up with her longtime collaborator, Lisa Cleaveland, to write one of the first books in the series, A Teacher's Guide to Getting Started with Beginning Writers.

You can find her on Twitter at @KatieWoodRay.

Stephanie Parsons is a literacy consultant, a former staff developer with Lucy Calkins and the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, and a former teacher. She loves working alongside teachers and children to discover new ways of teaching. She hopes you will feel the power of transformative teaching along with your students. After attending Yale University and Teachers College at Columbia University, she became a first grade teacher at P.S. 321 in Brooklyn. She is now a reading and writing staff developer working with elementary schools in New York City and across the country.