State-of-the-art units, tools and methods for teaching writing

Comprehensive writing program designed to save you time

The series provides well-planned resources for teaching writing. It’s designed to guide teachers through lessons that help students meet and exceed writing expectations.

At every year level, detailed units of work include lesson plans along with mini-lessons and small group work to help students develop and improve their skills in writing.

The series helps students move independently through their writing and also gives teachers the opportunity to conduct strategic performance assessments to help monitor students’ progress.

Developed by renowned author Lucy Calkins

The series has been crafted by experienced author Lucy Calkins and her colleagues. Lucy has more than 30 years experience in developing state-of-the-art reading and writing teaching methods.

The series has been piloted and revised in thousands of classrooms over decades.

It primarily focuses on high volume of writing and daily protected writing time which leads to greater fluency and proficiency.

Read more about the research here.

Seamless transition between grades

The series provides writing workshops for Foundation level through to Year 8.

Each year level has specific units of study designed to meet developmental and curricular needs of students.

From Foundation to Year 5, the units encourage students to teach opinion, information, and narrative writing with increasing complexity.

Progressing to the higher year levels, Year 6-8, the series moves to prepare students to write argumentative essays, while extending their skills in information and narrative writing.

Teacher's support

The series provides strong scaffolding and clear instructions for teaching writing workshops.

Each unit of study provides five to six weeks of teaching support which includes exemplar texts that model writing progressions across all grade levels.

A Workshop Curriculum for Grades K-8

Built on best practices and a proven framework developed over decades of work, the writing units support explicit instruction, provide rich opportunities for practice, and help teachers use learning progressions to set students on trajectories of growth.

• The writing units of study help teachers provide their students with instruction, opportunities for practice, and concrete achievable goals to help them meet and exceed high expectations.
• Underpinned by proven tools and methods, the teaching in these books has been planned, taught, revised, and retaught, through a cycle of improvement involving thousands of classrooms in schools around the world.
• Each writing unit has a clear instructional arc, representing about five to six weeks of teaching, structured into three or four ‘bends in the road’.

A Predictable Five-Part Workshop Framework

The writing workshop is deliberately designed to offer a simple and predictable framework so that the teacher can focus on the complex work of observing students’ progress and teaching to their needs.

• Each session begins with a mini lesson. Students sit with a long-term partner while in the mini lesson.
• The mini lesson ends with the students being sent off to their own independent work.
• As students work, the teacher confers with them and leads small groups.
• Partway through independent work time, the teacher stands a delivers a mid-workshop teaching point.
• The workshop ends with a share.

Explore the components for K-5     Explore the components for 6-8