I really like how this book approaches writing by providing manageable chunks to focus lessons on. There were very good teaching ideas for voice trait, weak for organization trait. I haven't got to the rest of the traits yet. I found the scoring guides too general for marking, as they didn't match what I taught the students. To mark the voice trait I focused on more specific parts of writing e.g. presence of verbs, adjectives and adverbs and actual choice of those words, presence of a declarative phrase, presence of descriptions and how well they worked. ( )

Finally a resource for teaching writing that provides concrete strategies and exemplars of how to encourage a student's creativity AND to help them to develop solid skills in conventions of writing. Their website is great - lots of extra blackline masters and available tools (I'm a huge fan of their preprinted sticky notes because they help ME to focus on what I'm marking on any given round of evaluation). Culham made me feel excited to teach writing again, and for that I'm profoundly grateful for this book. ( )