Growing Writers is a comprehensive writing program for K-2, designed to accelerate student achievement and nurture a love of writing.
Comprehensive instruction: Growing Writers includes instruction in basic skills that create success and competence. These skills are handwriting, spacing, grammar, capitalization, punctuation, and sentence structure. Research shows that handwriting is an essential skill for writing fluency and that handwriting instruction supports phonics learning.
Accelerated learning: The design of Growing Writers incorporates the science of learning by expertly pacing the introduction of new information. This expert pacing, proven to work in over 20 years of action research, creates a strong base from which students can confidently move forward.
Social-emotional learning: Writing is meant to be shared, and this sharing builds trust and classroom community. Growing Writers incorporates some type of sharing into every lesson.
Writing tasks: Each Growing Writers lesson includes a basic skills practice and a writing task. Some days are “free choice” writing and other days may have a prompt, opinion writing, factual writing, or a personal narrative. Tasks are designed to be engaging and fun and to give lots of time for writing practice in different genres.
Mindset and Mindfulness: From the beginning, students learn that good writers have a mindset of being open to change and improvement. Even before the writing process is fully taught, students learn to edit for neat handwriting and punctuation. They learn to easily accept feedback from the teacher and from their peers. Students also learn a quiet, focused, “mindful” approach to writing in each lesson’s silent work period.
Grammar is fun: Students love how Growing Writers approaches grammar, with silly sentences, making up sentences as a class, and “Mad-Lib” activities… let’s get rid of the idea that grammar has to be boring!
What teachers are saying
“I have some boys who get easily distracted and tired of writing. I was nervous about doing the program every day. But as soon as I started it they really looked forward to the routine and they liked knowing what was coming. The consistency of the program worked really well for those kids. Even the kids that really struggle with fine motor skills enjoy the task of the lessons. It isn’t a battle.”
“The group lesson before starting the books each day is so valuable. They really don’t want to have to fix their work. They want to get it right the first time, so I think they know that group lesson is valuable too.”
“Everything just flows. The creative choice writing every day gives me the time to walk around and check everyone’s work on the conventions. A lot of kids are proud of their work and they want you to check it, so I try to get around to everyone each day. I like that the program gives me time to do that.”
“It is nice to make time for writing and to have it in the schedule. I’ve never had that. Sure, we did writing as a part of science and social studies and reading and all that but we weren’t teaching it. I don’t think we can expect kids to just know how to write. If you don’t teach it, how do you expect them to know it? It gives me chills to think where my kids would be if we hadn’t had Growing Writers this year.”