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This text models for teachers how to help children learn and write by establishing comfort with writing, building confidence, and developing competence. Several themes run through the learning-to-write-process presented in this text:• Writing is communication;• Writing is a powerful tool for learning;• How children feel about their writing and themselves as writers affects how they learn to write;• Teachers are coworkers with students; children from many backgrounds can learn to write together. The text sythesizes what we know about how children learn, how we write, and what we write into a process of teaching children to write. It is intended to serve as a starting place for developing theories of how to best teach writing.

Evaluating Children's Writing: A Handbook of Grading Choices for Classroom Teachers, Second Edition introduces and explains a wide range of specific evaluation strategies used by classroom teachers to arrive at grades and gives explicit instructions for implementing them. Samples of student writing accompany the instructions to illustrate the techniques, and an appendix of additional student writing is provided to allow readers to practice particular evaluation strategies.More than just a catalog of grading options, however, this is a handbook with a point of view. Its purpose is to help teachers become intentional about their grading practices. Along with recipes for grading techniques, it offers a philosophy of evaluating student writing that encourages teachers to put grading into a communication context and to make choices among the many options available by determining the instructional purpose of the assignment and considering the advantages and disadvantages of particular grading strategies. Specific grading techniques are integrated with suggestions about the craft of evaluation--guidelines for instructional objectives, for student audience analysis, and for teacher self-analysis that help define communication contexts.New in the Second Edition:•a new chapter on state standards and assessments;•a reorganization of the chapter on approaches to grading;•additions to the chapter on management systems;•additions to the chapter on teaching yourself to grade;•additions to the annotated bibliography; and•updated references throughout the text.