Writer's Workshop, teaching writing to children, writing teacher, english teacher

About | Legal | Privacy | Advertise

Proud To Be the #1 Educational Website on the Internet.

Teachtopia is for Teachers, Parents, and Students.

Search Teachtopia

Share or Bookmark this Page \

There is nothing more exciting than starting a Writer's Workshop Program in your classroom. In writer’s workshop, students go through a process set forth by their classroom teacher that ultimately allows them to "publish" their own fiction (and sometime nonfiction) book.

Teachtopia's suggested sequence for Writer's Workshop:

1. The Student Notebook- Every Student Needs to have their own notebook (or folder) to store all their writer's workshop materials. Organization is key to all writing. As much as they might want to use a computer throughout the entire process, it is important for writers to keep "hard copies" of everything done throughout each stage of the process in these folders. It also allows the teacher to quickly check on an individual student's progress by asking for his or her's workshop folder.

2. The Student Created Clustering of Ideas For A Topic

With just a plane white sheet of paper, students are to first write a huge list of things that interest them.

From there, it is the teacher responsibility to have the student take a large

3. The Table of Contents- After students have spent some time coming up with ideas for their story, it is time for them to commit to an idea. Whether their book is fiction or non-fiction they could begin to develop a "in progress" Table of Contents.

Writer's Workshop

4. The Writing Process (filling in those chapters)- This may be a couple of

weeks into the writing process. It is here where the students get to begin

writing those chapters. What you must notice that if students were to sit

down and start writing their books without the clustering and table of

contents already produced, their product would likely end after a few pages.

5. Getting a Title There is no rush in developing a title for a book.

6. Filling in those paragraphs once Again

7. Time to start sharing Before entering the peer editing process, it is

nice for students to simply begin sharing their ideas and work thus far

with other children and their teacher.

8. The Peer editing process

It is important for students to know that despite having a situation where

their peers are going to give "constructive criticism" it is ultimately up to

them to decide what changes they are going to make.

9. Student Revision and Teacher Editing

10. Publishing

With the modern accessibility of computers all publishing should now be typewritten.