
Can your own writing lead you back to where you find happiness? Here’s hoping!

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It’s my pleasure to announce new additions to our dynamic team of classroom teachers, literacy coaches, staff developers, and authors who are joining TWT as co-authors and contributing writers.

Even as the year winds down, third-grade teacher Danielle and I are working to make her inquiry-based approach to workshop even more student centered. How? By taking the necessity of record-keeping beyond the merely manageable and transforming the workshop through student-engaged assessment. Which of Danielle’s practices will you explore as you close out your year?

Puppets are powerful vehicles through which kindergarten students can develop characters and experiment with storytelling and play is essential to the way that young children learn. By combining puppets and play, children can begin to do the important pre-writing work necessary to develop rich characters and powerful stories in writing workshop.

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These tumbleweeds feel like a metaphor for the writers in our workshops: the times they dance freely across the landscape and the times they get stuck. As a teacher of writers, it’s prompting me to step back and reflect on those stuck places. I hope to offer you a similar moment of reflection on the tumbleweed-jams that might be forming in your own workshop(s).

Middle grade author Elly Swartz shares how true authenticity and emotional resonance are the secret sauce in her writing, and how important it is for children to dream big and understand that rejection doesn’t define them.

Author-illustrator Ying-Hwa Hu is reminiscing the sunny walk in San Francisco’s Chinatown that brought about the creation of her author-illustrator solo debut Ten Blocks to the Big Wok. The sights, sound and tight-knit community she witnessed come together in a picture of happiness she tells in her story.

Cartoonist Gavin Aung Than shares the process of creating his middle-grade graphic novel series, Super Sidekicks.