Writer's Workshop for Middle & High School Students

I first learned about the writer's workshop model during a summer institute with my local chapter of The National Writing Project. We engaged in lessons from Linda Christensen's books Teaching for Joy and Justice: Re-Imagining the Language Arts Classroom and Reading, Writing, and Rising Up: Teaching About Social Justice and the Power of the Written Word, which I was able to transfer directly into my high school classroom the following school year.

I loved the use of relevant mentor texts to draw out students' own stories plus the emphasis on revision. In sharing their work with their peers, students received direct feedback but also learned from seeing and hearing each others' writing "moves." If you are interested in a more engageing writing process for your middle or high school students, this post is for you.

The Most Popular Books In My Middle School Classroom Library This Year

My classroom library is the heart of my classroom. My school doesn’t have a school library so the books in my classroom are it for my sixth grade students as far as immediately accessible books. We do independent reading daily in my classroom so I want there to be plenty of books for them to access.

Last year I started taking a closer look at the top checkouts in my classroom library through a report I exported from Booksource  (the library management system I use; it’s free!). While I always have a general sense of what is popular and what hasn’t left the shelf, I liked being able to look at the actual data to make decisions about what books to add or weed from my classroom library.

Read on for the top book checkouts by genre (plus graphic novels) from my classroom library this past school year.