About the Authors by: Katie Wood Ray

If you are struggling to get your students excited about writers workshop, this book is a wonderful tool. Katie Wood Ray shows you how to implement the workshop approach into your classroom and create lessons that the students will love. The book has a great deal of lesson ideas as well as general rules for creating an environment conducive for creativity and a passion for writing. I continually go back to this book as a reference and for fresh ideas to try with my kids all the time!
Pictures: In the word study picture above the students receive 3-5 words a week. Each students words are different based upon ability level and they choose which activities they would like to work on all week with the words that were provided. Through authentic activities students learn to read and write the words correctly. IN the second picture the students list words that they feel are "boring" words such as good, and they come up with WOW words like extraordinary in place of their boring word.
In the book Katie Wood Ray also shows students that it is okay to have spelling errors and she created a wall chart called "I am not afraid of my words" where students write a word on the chart that they have spelled and then the teacher writes the correct spelling next to the word to show that it is okay to make mistakes and learn from those mistakes.

Synopsis (Barnes and Noble)

About the Authors is about the littlest authors - those in kindergarten through second grade. Based on a profound understanding of the ways in which young children learn, it shows teachers how to launch a writing workshop by inviting children to do what they do naturally - make stuff. So why not write books?

Gifted educator and author of the best-selling What You Know by Heart (Heinemann, 2002), Katie Wood Ray has seen young authors do just that. And she wants your students to be able to do the same. Beautifully describing young children in the act of learning, she demonstrates what it takes to nourish writing right from the start:

• a supportive environment that enables even the youngest students to write
• respect and sensitivity to the way children really learn
• inviting instruction that both encourages and elevates young writers
• rich language that stimulates writing
• classroom talk and children's literature that energize young writers
• developmental considerations that shape the structure of the workshop, making it natural, joyful, and absolutely appropriate.

What's more, Ray explains step by step how to set up and maintain a primary writing workshop, detailing eleven units of study that cover idea generation, text structures, different genres, and illustrations that work with text. She also draws on data, projects, and the language of teaching used in the classroom of first-grade teacher Lisa Cleaveland. Ray allows readers to "listen in" to Lisa as she helps her young students learn from professional writers, work with intention, and think about their own process.

Chockfull of examples of little books by young children, About the Authors is proof positive that a primary writing workshop is a smart writing move.