Meet Austin, a Nevada sixth grader. We got to know Austin when he attended a Northern Nevada Writing Project Summer TWIST Camp. This summer, Austin agreed to go through the steps of the writing process for our brand new "Lesson of the Month" that was created for September. He has provided the first revised and edited student sample for a lesson we hope to receive many other samples from creative kids all over the country.

Our friend Austin has already encouraged his second-grade brother, Carson, to create an additional student sample for us. Both boys' stories can be accessed here. If your students write to the same lesson that Austin used, you can now post up to three of your favorite samples at our ning.

Meet Jodie Black. Jodie is a Nevada kindergarten teacher who served as Co-director for the NNWP between 2002 and 2007.

Jodie helped build two popular pages here at WritingFix--both pages based on a popular NNWP inservice that Jodie has taught in the past. WritingFix's Kindergarten Writers Workshop Page and its Traits and Primary Writers Page are thanks to this teacher.

BUT MORE IMPORTANTLY, over the summer of 2010, Jodie launched her own webpage about teaching writing in kindergarten, and we're very proud of her for this achievement: www.teacherjodieblack.com

Mentor Texts

A Mentor Text --here is the definition from Corbett Harrison (one of the NNWP's very own consultants with his own website for teachers!)-- is a published piece of writing whose idea, whose structure, or whose written craft can be used to inspire a student to write something original.

Quite a few of our Northern Nevada teacher workshops focus on lesson design around a specific type of mentor text. Using the lessons posted at WritingFix, it is very easy for us to design an entire inservice workshop where teachers study a number of really good mentor text-inspired writing lessons, then work together to create original lessons around mentor texts from their own classroom bookshelves.

Finding these lessons: With the light-blue menu bar found in the upper left-hand corner of all WritingFix pages, if you hover over "Mentor Text Lessons," you will discover a drop-down menu of the types of mentor texts we've designed workshops around in Northern Nevada.

Writing Traits

Comparatively to other regions, Northern Nevada teachers have had a fairly long and generally positive relationship with the writing traits. Since 1980, our NNWP has been offering regular and interactive workshops on the six traits of writing, so when traits became the language of our state writing assessment rubrics a little while back, we took the news better than many states who'd had a different history.

Just about every inservice class currently offered by the NNWP makes some reference to the writing traits. Because it can be such a foundational topic in improving writing instruction, we do offer certain workshops that are very trait focused.

Finding these resources: In the light-blue menu bar found in the upper left-hand corner of all WritingFix pages, if you hover over "The 6 Writing Traits," you will discover a drop-down menu of trait-focused materials we use in our workshops.

Genres/Modes of Writing

Good writing can achieve many different purposes. Our students need exposure to exciting lessons that will help them learn about each genre of writing and apply their new knowledge with original writing that feels important or valuable to them.

Every school year, the NNWP offers local inservice classes that help teacher participants make new connections about the genres of writing. Participants analyze lessons about genre, then they collaborate to create original lessons for their classrooms. At WritingFix, we've developed resource pages to go with each genre of writing. These pages contain lessons and mentor text suggestions specific to the genre. If you can't attend our face-to-face version of the class, these pages offer you an opportunity to analyze the same lessons we use during our classtime.

Finding these resources: On the blue menu bar found in the upper left-hand corner of all WritingFix pages, hover over "Writing Genres" and select one of the genres/modes that interests you.

Writing Across the Curriculum

Writing is not a skill, tool, or curriculum that belongs to the Language Arts teachers. It should not be something that exclusively happens during literacy block. Any teacher, no matter what the content of a lesson, can challenge deeper student thinking by requiring students to write before, during, and/or after the learning occurs.

But you can't simply assign writing to your students and expect your lesson to become better. As part of your lesson, you must teach writing --the skills, the process, and/or the qualities--if your goal is to deepen students' thinking. Our inservice classes on Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) help teachers find ways to teach writing with more content than they currently are. Most of the WAC workshops we offer have a companion page here at WritingFix.

Finding these resources: In the light-blue menu bar found in the upper left-hand corner of all WritingFix pages, if you hover over "Across the Curriculum," you will see our WAC topics, including links to our "sister sites," HistoryFix, NumberFix, and ScienceFix.

Each school year, we select a new theme and a mentor text, and we invite teachers worldwide to share their teaching ideas inspired by the chosen theme and the text. We call this invitation "The Mentor Text of the Year" Network, and we're excited to be heading into our third year of hosting this program.

This school year, our theme is Using Writers Notebooks, and we have two mentor texts we're encouraging teachers to add to their classroom bookshelves: A Writer's Notebook by Ralph Fletcher and Amelia's Notebook by Marissa Moss.

All year long, we will be posting local teachers' classroom ideas inspired by these two texts, but we are again accepting submissions from teachers worldwide. If you share a thematic idea with us that we post, we'll send you one of the NNWP Print Guides as our way of saying, "Thanks for sharing back with WritingFix!"

Visit our Mentor Text of the Year Homepage for details on how to share and to see what's already been shared.

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