6-8 Year-Long Middle School Writing Curriculum Bundle (11 Units Total)

Imagine making one purchase and having your entire middle school writing curriculum DONE for you this school year. Even better? The curriculum has a laid out scope & sequence, is aligned to meet every single standard for persuasive writing, informative/explanatory writing, narrative writing, and research, and uses best teaching practices to highly engage all students in your classroom.

What is included in each of the 11 writing units?

• Unit Plan: an overview of the minilesson statements, each aligned to a Common Core State Standard for narrative writing, persuasive writing, informative/explanatory writing, or research (depending on the unit) sequenced to guide students through the writing process from start to finish.
• Detailed Minilessons: Fully-scripted writing minilessons for the teacher so that they can explicitly walk students through the gradual release of responsibility (minilesson statement, modeling, have-a-go, application, share) in each minilesson. The minilessons take students through each part of the writing process (genre immersion, pre-write, organize & outline, draft, revise, edit, publish & share). *Each unit contains between 13-16 minilessons. Download the preview to see an example of a unit plan with the minilesson statements and a minilesson in its entirety.
• Mentor Text: A mentor text, written by me, to reference throughout the writing process. The mentor text was written to exemplify each minilesson and be used as a tool for modeling and a reference during writing conferences/guided writing.
• Question Prompts for Writing Conferences: Question prompts specific to each minilesson to use in writing conferences and/or guided writing each day to reinforce the concept being taught are included. These questions make it seamless to hold writing conferences that will make a huge impact on students' writing.
• Student Handouts and Reference Guides: Student materials (prewriting sheets, graphic organizers, outline, reference sheets to assist with specific minilessons, handouts with prompting questions to guide revision, etc.) needed for each minilesson are included. A student "Editing Guide" is also included to assist students during the editing phase with capitalization, spelling, homophone, punctuation, commas, and sentence types reference sheets.
• Rubric Options: Rubrics are designed to assess the specific genre and type of writing in the writing unit. There are different rubric options included so teachers can use the rubric that works best for their purpose.
• Grade 6 CCSS-Aligned Rubric
• Grade 7 CCSS-Aligned Rubric
• Grade 8 CCSS-Aligned Rubric
• Minilesson-Based Rubric: does not mention specific CCSS standards and is based on the minilessons taught in the writing unit
• Just Feedback Rubric: designed to get students reading and thinking about feedback.
• Students Self-Assessment Rubric: where students assess before the teachers assess.
• Proficiency Rubric: this rubric is fully defined for what a 3, 2, 1, and 0 means for each grading criteria.
• Sentence Level Writing Activities: Sentence level writing activities are included to help you guide your students through writing sentences with appositives, compound sentences, complex sentences, sentences with items in a series, and more. These can be used as a class starter during the writing unit. Having students practice sentence level writing will improve students' writing conventions and sentence variety.

***All lessons, student handouts, and rubrics come in a PDF and Microsoft Word version so teachers can use the materials in a way that best suits their teaching style and students’ needs. Additionally, all presentations are included as Google Slides and all students handouts are included as Google Docs for ease of use in Google Classroom.

Extras included in the bundle:

• Writing Curriculum Scope & Sequence with suggestions for a year-long curriculum or how to use the 10 writing units for a systematic approach across multiple grade levels school-wide.
• Student Writing Companion Workbook with reference pages on homophones, capitalization rules, comma rules, commonly misspelled and misused words, punctuation, types of sentences, transition words and phrases, nonfiction leads, and fiction leads. The Student Writing Companion Workbook also contains a "Writing Treasures" page for students to store words, sentences, and dialogue tags they would like to use or mimic in their future writing, a "Beginnings and Endings" page where students can collect powerful examples of how authors start and stop writing, and a "Writing Territories" page where students can sort the areas they enjoy writing about to help them come up with writing topics throughout the writing units all year long.
• Writing Assessments to use at the beginning middle and end of the school year (or at the points of the school year that make sense to you) to track students' writing progress. The assessments include a writing sample and coordinating rubric that puts students into a writing stage and a sentence dictation assessment that quickly assesses students' control over writing conventions in context.
• Writing Conference structure reference sheet, information about how to have effective writing conferences, and graphic organizers to track student conferences.
• Guided Writing information, graphic organizers, and lesson plan template.
• Beginning of the Year Writing Interview questions to ask students to get to know them as writers.
• "Writing I've Published" student handout for students to track the writing units, topics, dates of publication, and their reflections for each unit across the year.

There are 3 purchase options for the writing units:

1. Purchase all eleven units and save $27 (20% off) by purchasing the Middle School Year-Long Writing Workshop Curriculum Bundle. This bundle includes awesome extras to help manage, assess, and thrive using a Writing Workshop all year.

2. Purchase the writing units as a mini-bundle and save $9.60 (20% off). Each mini-bundle includes four writing units (1 persuasive, 1 informative/explanatory, 1 narrative, 1 research). There are three mini-bundle options, each containing a different variety of writing units. Choose the one that works best for you and your students.

-6-8 Writing Workshop Units Bundle (Option 1)

-6-8 Writing Workshop Units Bundle (Option 2)

-6-8 Writing Workshop Units Bundle (Option 3)

3. Purchase the writing units individually to meet your writing instruction needs. The 11 writing units are linked below.

-Deleted Scene-Narrative Writing

-Blog Post-Informative/Explanatory Writing

-Product Review-Persuasive Writing

-Ask Anything-Research Writing

-Narrative Nonfiction-Narrative Writing Unit

-Literary Analysis-Informative/Explanatory Writing

-Important Issue Letter-Persuasive Writing

-Memoir Vignettes-Narrative Writing

-Quote to Live By-Informative/Explanatory Writing

-Book Recommendation-Persuasive Writing

-Children's Book-Narrative Writing

*Do you teach students how to write or tell them to write? There is a big difference between teaching and telling.

*These writing units take students through the writing process step-by-step through a series of detailed minilessons with explicit modeling examples. You can feel confident in your teaching and will love the writing engagement and results you get from students.

You might also like…

• Writing Workshop Kick-off for Grades 5-6
• Writing Workshop Kick-off for Grades 7-8
• Writing Workshop Assessment Tools
• Realistic Fiction Middle School Reading Unit
• Nonfiction Middle School Reading Unit

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