Research and experience show that when teachers give children choice in what they write about, students’ engagement in their writing increases. So imagine what can happen when you offer them choices about what genres to write in and what kinds of voices to write from. The possibilities are unlimited, and the strength and depth of the connection that students make to a subject can be profound. In Writing Without Boundaries you’ll find out how to unlock this potential in all your students as they discover what it means to write with purpose.
Writing Without Boundaries gives you everything you need to get started teaching multigenre writing. Suzette Youngs and Diane Barone demonstrate why it works, providing the rationale, the research, and examples of completed student work. Then they take you inside classrooms to show how they and other teachers implement multimodal papers and how these lessons in topic selection, organization, audience, planning, and presentation will forever change how primary and intermediate students approach writing. You’ll discover how the writing workshop model can help you coordinate the efforts of your whole class even while you support each student in selecting from more than 60 genres to communicate their interests.
Best of all, Writing Without Boundaries includes classroom-tested units of study that use multigenre writing to enhance and extend your curriculum across the disciplines. These units give students the chance to explore content from several perspectives as they:
- write and speak from the point of view of historical figures
- compose biographies of famous or personally meaningful figures
- investigate historical situations
- respond to literature.
With its emphasis on choice, voice, and audience, Writing Without Boundaries cultivates students’ familiarity with genres while also helping them understand how real-world readers and writers communicate through genre and how a single topic can be seen, and written about, from many, many perspectives. Show students the power of combining genres. Read Writing Without Boundaries and open them up to a new world of possibilities.
