A New Year Brings a New Curriculum!
Demme Learning has extended our language arts offerings to now include WriteShop, an award-winning curriculum that has been creating engaged, enthusiastic, and skilled writers since 2001. WriteShop equips instructors with all they need to teach writing to students from kindergarten through high school levels. The hands-on, interactive lessons will engage even the most reluctant of writers. Students will practice various kinds of writing, including creative, expository, narrative, and persuasive, through parent-led activities that gently guide them through each step of the writing process.
Why WriteShop?
WriteShop is a great choice for many due to its flexibility and guidance. The curriculum provides step-by-step lesson plans so even instructors who don’t feel like strong writers can teach their students. Assignments are open-ended, allowing students to explore their own interests while providing concrete assessment criteria for objective grading and feedback.
WriteShop also:
- Provides a structured, personalized, and example-driven writing curriculum with instructor-led, interactive activities
- Walks students through the entire writing process, even at the earliest levels
- Reinforces, reviews, and builds upon earlier learning through incremental lessons that gradually increase in difficulty
- Supplies alternative activities so instructors can readily customize the level of challenge for each student
- Allows for flexible, adaptable scheduling to meet your and your student’s needs
The Beginnings of WriteShop
Kim Kautzer and Debbie Oldar founded WriteShop in 2001 after struggling to find a writing program that fit the needs of their homeschooled middle school children. They sought a program that helped instructors teach, guide, and evaluate student writing in a simple way. The core element of their homeschool journey was a hands-on approach to learning, which they were happy to incorporate when first teaching their writing classes. This material became their flagship program, WriteShop I and WriteShop II. Later, they enlisted the help of Nancy Sanders to adapt the components of the curriculum for younger students, thus launching WriteShop Primary and WriteShop Junior.
Why WriteShop Fits into the Demme Learning Family
There are many similarities between the founding principles of WriteShop and the philosophy behind the other Demme Learning curriculums that make it such a great fit.
1) Flexibility Among Levels So Students Begin at Their “Best-Fit” Place
WriteShop levels gradually increase in complexity; however, the core components of the writing process are found throughout every level. This means a student can begin at the level most comfortable for them without missing important lessons. As the student builds confidence in their writing skills, they can move up to more advanced levels. Over time, the student builds mastery through repetition and practicing the core components. This flexibility also makes it easier to teach students of varying ages at the same time.
2) Hands-On Projects Help the Student “See” Writing Happen
There is so much more to WriteShop than simply putting sentences on paper. In the early levels, instructors can encourage students to use dictation or text-to-speech technology to compose stories if the student is not confident in their writing ability. The Primary and Junior levels include a lot of creative formats for the students’ final pieces, while WriteShop I and WriteShop II use supplemental elements to expand skills during the writing process.
3) Instructor-Led Curriculum to Guide the Process
Using WriteShop is a truly collaborative experience between instructor and student. In the early levels, the instructor models concepts and examples and offers feedback and encouragement. As the student begins to work more independently, the instructor can still help them break down their assignments into manageable chunks, manage their workload and deadlines, and assess the writing for mastery.
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