BBW is coming! 

In a couple of days, ten people will receive the Advanced Review Copy of my book Building Better Writers. It is the most exciting and nerve-racking experience to share your writing with the world! During the month of May, we will make all the necessary edits,  and in June BBW will be available on the Seidlitz Education online bookstore and Amazon. I can’t wait for you to check it out!  So, I want to tell you a little about the book. 

The Origins of BBW

As a high school classroom teacher, I had two preps: mainstream English and ESOL classes. Not everything that worked in my mainstream ELA classroom was good for language learners. I could not ignore the fact that English was a foreign language to them! I envisioned a resource that addressed my students’ needs. Feeling that the best tools were somewhere between those two worlds- ELA and ESL (or even EFL!)- I collected and studied everything I could get my hands on. In the picture below, are the most influential authors from both fields.

Not all of my ELA books are here. I had to leave many of them on the campuses where I worked as an ELA content specialist, but you can probably see some familiar names. Activities and ideas from these authors drove the ELA side of my instruction, but many things had to be adapted to become palatable to my language learners.

What’s in BBW? 

During my 12 years in education, I have been watching my colleagues and listening to my students, finding what worked and shedding what didn’t.  Around 2016, I narrowed down to a handful of writing strategies that truly helped my students do better on STAAR ( end-of-course assessment in Texas). I presented my writing unit at Houston TESOL the following year. Shortly after, with the help of Allison Hand, Anna Matis, and John Seidlitz, the writing unit was developed into the training and the resource “Moving ELs Forward on STAAR/ EOC”. You may even have the booklet like the one below! That booklet in its updated format is the origin of Part 3 of the book- the chapter on composition.

Part 4 Activities! 

At the end of every school year, I would ask my students to let me keep their notebooks. I have ended up with stacks of them in my garage. As I flipped through the pages, I saw that the unit on composition was just the tip of the iceberg, and my students’ success in writing was largely due to the amount of sentence and paragraph-level work they did during the year. We studied verb form, sentence types, phrases, types of clauses, placement of adverbs, and comparative and superlative degrees of adjectives- those “sit-ups” and “pull-ups” of language study that nobody wants to do.

You cannot “drill and kill” your way into writing fluency, but to internalize a language form you do need a sufficient amount of practice that goes beyond a couple of pages from a workbook. That is why there are 60 activities!  I hope your kids will like them! Pick the ones that fit your students’ needs and your teaching style!

Conference on June 15th

BBW is best when experienced hands-on! Of course, you can read the description of an activity, but playing through it with your colleagues is much better! My goal for June 15 is to show you as many games as possible!  

https://seidlitzeducation.com/upcoming-events/june15buildingbetterwriters/