by Adrienne Gear
Pembroke Publishers, 2011
ISBN 978-1-55138-263-0 (sc)
$24.95, 170 pp, index, teachers’ resources
www.pembrokepublishers.com
You may be familiar with Adrienne Gear’s first two books Reading Power and Nonfiction Reading Power which focus on strategies to help students become more aware of their thinking while they are reading. Writing Power is another useful resource that guides teachers to link their reading and writing instruction by using the same five thinking strategies: Transform, Infer, Question, Connect and Visualize. In Writing Power educators will discover some effective ways to teach their students how to develop their writing skills so that their audience is fully engaged. The key ideas from The Writing Process and the Six Traits of Writing by Ruth Culham are acknowledged and integrated into Adrienne’s work. Writing Power includes a series of sequential lessons focusing on each strategy, suggestions for books to use with your students, student work samples, assessment rubrics and blackline masters of some useful graphic organizers.
I have attended several of Adrienne’s workshops and have read and enjoyed using her first two books since they were published. In my role as Literacy Lead Teacher I frequently used, or adapted, her lessons for giving weekly demonstration lessons around the school (and yes, even the Grade 6 class enjoyed singing the songs!). I also found Adrienne’s suggested lists of anchor books for teaching the five strategies useful when starting a collection of books for our professional library. Adrienne’s ability to present what we know to be “best practice” in comprehension instruction in a thoughtful and user friendly way is a gift to the teaching community. I would highly recommend Writing Power.
Review by Brenda Boreham.
This review is from Canadian Teacher Magazine’s Mar/Apr 2012 issue.