My Quick Writes: For Inside Writing » (1st Edition)

Donald H. Graves has been involved in writing research for two decades. His books Writing: Teachers & Children at Work (Heinemann, 1983) and A Fresh Look at Writing (Heinemann, 1994) are best-sellers throughout the English-speaking world and have revolutionized the way writing is taught in schools. Dr. Graves has been a teacher, school principal, and language supervisor, education director, and a director of language in bilingual, ESL, and special programs. He has also been a co-director of an undergraduate urban teacher preparation program and a professor of an early childhood program. He is currently Professor Emeritus at the University of New Hampshire and lives in Jackson, New Hampshire.

As a professional development coordinator for the Conway, New Hampshire, School District, Penny Kittle acts as a K-12 literacy coach and directs new-teacher mentoring. In addition, she teaches writing at Conway's Kennett High School and in the Summer Literacy Institutes at the University of New Hampshire. Penny is the author of four books with Heinemann-Write Beside Them: Risk, Voice, and Clarity in High School Writing (2008) which won the 2009 James N. Britton Award from NCTE, Inside Writing (2005), coauthored with Donald H. Graves, The Greatest Catch (2005), and Public Teaching(2003)-and she is a Heinemann Professional Development Provider. Please join us in congratulating Penny Kittle for her 2009 NCTE Britton Award for Write Beside Them! Click here to learn more about her award. Penny's students make a statement about how student choice in reading has affected them, click here to watch the video.

Part writer's notebook and part sourcebook, My Quick Writes includes more than sixty of Donald Graves' favorite and most effective prompts for practicing and reflecting on your own writing processes. Graves and Penny Kittle walk you through how to do Quick Writes and the role they play in their own writing and teaching. Then they offer you ample personal space for doing them yourself. You'll try out new ideas, techniques, and genres, such as:

• thinking and writing from different points of view
• writing poems
• putting together personal narratives
• turning favorite or poignant letters into essays
• creating fiction.

In addition, Graves and Kittle present seventeen prompts to try with your students. With these prompts, you'll connect the experience of doing Quick Writes on your own to your students' experiences with them, while at the same time helping children prepare for timed writing tests without giving over your writing workshop to test prep.

My Quick Writes is the hands-on way to practice and reflect on your writing process as you implement the apprenticeship model for teaching writing described in Inside Writing. Even if you don't consider yourself a writer, join Donald Graves and Penny Kittle and learn more about your writing and that of your students with My Quick Writes.

Getting Started: The First 30 Quick Writes

Point of View

Poetry

Letters into Essays

Fiction

Quick Writes for Children