How to Write Source Workbooks
Source writing workbooks are designed to help kindergarten through 12th-grade students become better writers, learners and thinkers through research-based resources. Source workbooks are an important component of language programs that try to help young writers develop the abilities and knowledge they need to succeed. Like all the source educational materials, exercises and tests, source notebooks are organized according to developmental stages and grades and are intended to meet educational standards.
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Instructions
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Learn the basic elements of source writing programs. Workbooks are an adjunct to a writing program. At young ages basic thinking, learning and communicating skills are needed to provide a good foundation for future abilities. Chief among the basic skills are vocabulary, spelling, grammar and organizing ideas to communicate. At older ages advanced writing and reasoning skills and knowledge are needed.
Included in The Alliance for Excellent Education version of the 11 key elements of adolescent writing programs are such areas as prewriting research activities, study of models and writing for content learning. Instruction in each of the elements you include must be geared to the learning abilities of students at their age and stage of development.
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Develop the source workbook lessons so that you have material for the students and instructional guides for their teachers in familiar formats. Workbook activities for students might include activities such as reading and writing essays on common themes, reading and writing fictional stories, student biographies, identifying ungrammatical sentences or misspellings and researching facts and opinions about educational, social or historical issues. Exercises might include writing sentences using a list of new vocabulary words, solving word puzzles or summarizing magazine articles in one or two sentences.
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Explain the purpose of each student source workbook activity for the teachers and indicate how it addresses their local educational standards. Formats may vary but content should cover four areas. These are measurable objectives that specify what the students will learn, information areas that provide content instruction and provide examples, steps to determine what each student has learned and needs as followup instruction and activities students can engage in independently to reinforce what they have learned.
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Find published source workbooks and study them. See how common material, such as fiction written by students, is varied according to grade and competency. Examine the explanations provided to teachers that explain the purposes for including those materials and how they supplement classroom or home schooling activities.
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- Photo Credit young woman book image by Liz Van Steenburgh from Fotolia.com
