This workbook is a good way to get to get to know your students in a slightly different way. The unique writing prompts are easy enough that hesitant students won't get discouraged. The book has 3 sections: beginning, end, and any time of the year. With 20 lessons with handouts, students will be challenged to explore their feelings about themselves and their surroundings. Each lesson has concrete tips to engage students, enhance material, and extend it for further study if desired. Handouts have sample answers to help gauge possible feedback from students. This handbook will be a valuable addition to any 4-8 grade curriculum. ( )

I won a copy of this book from Librarything.
We homeschool our children (for over 30 yrs.) and decided to try to incorporate a few of these exercises into my 6th graders writing lessons.
She enjoyed the lessons but felt they were a bit simplistic for her. Looking through the lessons they appear to get more advanced so we'll continue with a few more of the lessons. These lessons are geared toward guiding students to express themselves through thought-provoking questions. Though this isn't a stand-alone curriculum, it is a good edition to a languauge arts program, whether it's a homeschool, after-school, or classroom. ( )

Creating Strong Kids Through Writing contains some fun writing lessons for beginning of the year, middle of the year, and even end of the year time frame. I had mixed feelings with this book. I marked a few lessons that I thought would work well with various reading and writing standards, but walked away thinking that most of these would end up being extension lessons or lessons that I would put on those close to "fill in the blank" holiday when kids are leaving early and you can't teach real content. Note that this is more creative writing.

Don't expect essay prompts from this book. Students will write poems and paragraphs around something creative, like starting each sentence with a different letter. The authors comment on this "less writing" aspect by saying they "invite them to compose very short pieces that, in their brevity, reveal a lot about our students' character and daily lives." They feel the shorter writing helps reluctant writers and requires "deeper analysis of word choice."

While the cover indicates it's for grades 4-8, as a fifth grade teacher, I felt that most of the content was better geared towards upper middle school and most of the sample writings were from those grades. However, I did see several suggestions that I wanted to modify so that it would work better for younger students.

If you are looking to build better relationships with your older middle-school students through short, creative writing, this is the perfect book for you. ( )

A creative and fresh group of 20 writing exercises for your 4th-8th graders to devour. While each lesson offers optional self disclosure of responses encouraging the class to open up should be easy as you can allow them to start with some degree of distance by answering as if they were famous figures from history or characters they recently read about. This book could easily be shared with other teachers in your school and, by asking the kids to respond from a different point of view depending on their grade, there is seemingly endless longevity for the exercises. ( )

I just received this book today and I absolutely love it. The handouts look amazing, and the topics are very relatable and needed. The lessons are laid out with objectives, resources and materials, context, social-emotional connections, the hook, inviting students to respond, and tips to enhance the lesson. The pages are easy to read with ample space for the students to fill in their answers. My favorite is handout 11.2 Fibonacci Poetry, and 11.3 the sample response. This is a unique book that is much needed as an added resource in the classroom.