TEXTS AND LESSONS FOR CONTENT-AREA WRITING

Develop those skills through 35 lessons that include (in various content areas) writing before, during, and after reading; digging deeper into texts; writing for understanding (after text analysis through prediction, rereading with questions in mind, summarizing, and charting); "close writing"; argumentation; note-taking techniques; and quick-writes to spark thinking. In three culminating projects, students assemble and support complex understandings by studying, debating, and writing about three sets of short texts; each set addresses a single topic from multiple perspectives, and each project focuses on a different suite of skills: explanatory/informational, persuasive/argumentative, and narrative nonfiction. Appendixes offer Common Core and other literacy skill correlations.