What You Know by Heart: How to Develop Curriculum for Your Writing Workshop

By Katie Wood Ray

Book Overview

No one can say it better than Lucy Calkins-Katie Ray has written a wise, comforting, intimate book. It goes to the heart of where good ideas for teaching of good writing originate: from yourself and your own experience.

As Katie shows, the most profound and effective curriculum can result from your own deep understanding of quality writing-what you know about writing through your own and others' writings and through your reading. And the best teaching can result from what you can wrap your heart and mind around and communicate to your students. It is this very personal approach and contagious enthusiasm that Katie brings to bear on creating curriculum for her own writing workshops. Her book shows how you can do it for your own.

In Part One, Katie takes a close look at the lines of thinking you can use to find curriculum in your own writing experiences. In Part Two, she shows how to use the same lines of thinking to find curriculum in your everyday reading life. Along with her own inimitable writing style, Katie sprinkles special features throughout her book as helpful tips for thinking about your own writing workshop and curriculum development, including:

minilessons and "curriculum chunks" "Thinking it Through" boxes with questions and things to try "understandings" and strategies notebook-keeping tips accompanied by Katie's own handwritten journal entries transcripts of interviews with writers references for further reading.

Follow Katie's example. Write like a teacher of writing. Read like a teacher of writing. Then teach from your own experience. And watch as you and your students flourish like never before.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0325003645
• ISBN13: 9780325003641
• Release Date: June 2002
• Publisher: Heinemann Educational Books
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 7.5" x 8.5"
• Grade Range: Kindergarten to Grade 8

Customer Reviews

A must Read!

What a delight to read a book on the teaching of writing that is simple, focused, purposeful and concise. Katie Wood Ray writes with determination. It is her goal to birth the writer in each of us. As the reader engages in the reading of her work she midwifes the writing process within the reader in a way that one embraces it and nurtures its growth.The teacher/student in each of us has a life that is rich in experiences and thus embedded with curriculum possibilities. Katie open the readers mind to the world of writing and its possibilities. She writes "We need to know by heart what it is we are trying to teach when we teach...".There are no virgin pages in my copy of her book. It is my goal that the truth found in the reading of her work will become my truth in my teaching of the writing process. A wonderful and necessary read for all teachers. Let's write!

Confused about mentor texts in mini-lessons?

Beware teachers, only read this book if you are ready to dive deeper into what it means to teach writing, as a writer! This is the first book I've read that explicitly breaks down how to use mentor texts and my own writing to support student learning in a writer's workshop. Katie Wood Ray uses wonderful examples of how to write and read like a teacher of writing. The first part of the book provides a process to study our own writing for curriculum development. The second part focuses on mentor texts; using published authors as co-teachers. Her goal is to pomote metacognition in the teachers that read this book and have them change their instruction in a powerful way. This is a slow read, but only because you have to stop to think and apply the concepts. Luckily, she created "Think It Through" boxes to help guide your reflections. I closed this book with a solid understanding of how I can use my own writing and use other authors to teach my writer's workshop. If you are using the writer's workshop approach, but don't consider yourself a writer, read this book. It will help you realze that you already know these things by heart.

What You Know By Heart Hits Home

There are few books on the market for writing teachers with such warm, insightful, fresh, and practical advice in them as this wonderful text by Katie Wood Ray. Her stories ring true, her advice is sage, and the layout of this piece is a knock out. I especially love the text suggestions to match curriculum statements in the appendix. This is real stuff - and oh, so very needed. My copy is marked up from the first page to the last; I just love this book. Any teacher wanting to make writing work more effectively in their classroom would do well to take this book to heart.