Writing Workouts: Strategies for Building Writing Skills and Success in Grades 6-12

With a strength-training approach, student writers go the distance, honing a plethora of skills. They don't just wing it - they list, picture, circle, strategize, and revise to make language come alive. Like ace athletes, they are highly trained and well-versed in the techniques found in Writing Workouts, a lively book that provides a method for instruction that gives students the fun they want and the targeted skill practice they need.

Author Rebecca Harper shows students how to systematically go about it, tying writing to relevant lessons and writing standards. The book offers activities such as slinky paragraphs, pop-up poems, and paint chip plotting to teach critical and creative writing. It helps students hone skills in persuasive writing, argument, fiction, poetry, memoir, and more. Additionally, it teaches students to toggle between brief and multi-step writing tasks to build stamina and to tap into auditory, visual, kinesthetic, and digital components of crafting.

The book also helps students think about word, sentence, and paragraph-level techniques, as well as jump the high-jumps of research writing by getting good at each smaller leap. For students in middle school and high school, the pressure of high-stakes writing tasks can feel like forever-sprinting. Writing Workouts offers a strength-training approach to success, allowing students to crowd out stress and build the skills they need.

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