Strengthening Students' Writing Skills While Decreasing Grading Time (Grades 3-6) Presented by Kathryn Starke Outstanding Literacy Coach, Presenter and Author

Specifically Designed for Educators Serving Grades 3-6: English/Language Arts Teachers, Classroom Teachers, Literacy Coaches, Special Education Staff and Administrators

• Practical, ready-to-use strategies and techniques for planning, assigning and evaluating student writing that maximize student success
• Specific, step-by-step methods to ensure a greater amount of quality writing in multiple genres while decreasing your assessment time
• Fitting it all in … How to teach your numerous ELA requirements, achieve high-quality writing results from all your students and reduce your take-home workload
• New and innovative strategies to dramatically reduce time spent grading while giving meaningful, specific feedback

Practical Ideas and Strategies

Looking to transform your students' writing skills while reducing your workload? If you're spending more time grading papers than your students spent writing them, or struggling to fit all the required skills into your lesson plans, Kathryn Starke's seminar is here to help! As an acclaimed national presenter and experienced elementary teacher, Kathryn will show you how to drastically reduce your grading time and implement effective feedback strategies. Plus, discover new and innovative daily techniques to take your students' writing to the next level. Designed for Grades 3-6, this seminar covers everything from peer feedback to student conferences, ensuring that every student receives the feedback they need to succeed. Don't miss this opportunity to revolutionize your writing instruction with practical, doable strategies that work for all levels of writers!

Kathryn will share dozens of new and innovative ways to reduce your workload while increasing your students' writing skills. From your struggling students to your more advanced writers, these tools work! Join Kathryn for a day filled with dozens of practical and doable strategies to strengthen your writing instruction and see powerful results!

Ten Key Benefits of Attending

1. Strengthen Your Students' Writing Skills
   Proven approaches for strengthening your students' writing … Practical strategies to get powerful results while creating a productive learning environment
2. Differentiate Your Writing Instruction
   Learn ways to create a cycle of student ownership and proficiency-based writing to better meet the diverse levels of students' writing skills
3. Reduce the Time You Spend Grading Student Writing
   Learn proven strategies to significantly reduce the time you spend grading while still increasing your students' writing skills
4. Learn Creative Approaches to Improve Student Engagement and Success With Writing
   Move "outside the box" to re-engage students with writing, and to find exhilarating and challenging ways to improve their writing
5. Provide More Effective Feedback to Improve Students' Writing
   Move beyond that time-consuming essay grading with minimal learning-curve … Techniques for giving more meaningful, more practical feedback without increasing your grading time
6. Utilize New Resources to Strengthen Writing Lessons, Collaboration and Accountability
   Explore how to easily implement online resources and collaborative exercises to increase student engagement and stamina in writing
7. Utilize Timesaving Ways to Assess all Genres of Writing
   Discover new, more time-efficient ways to teach students how to produce and edit writing across genres
8. The Keys to Practically and Successfully Teaching Complete Lessons
   Develop standards-based, flexible assessments to clarify learning and simplify your planning
9. Organize Your Writing Lessons to Increase Student Success
   Develop strategies for flexible prepping and planning to help your students become more confident and competent writers … Discover practical ways writing supports your reading instruction as well
10. Substantially Increase the Time You Spend Actually Teaching Writing
    Receive extensive ideas that will allow you to immediately spend less time grading and more time focused on creative instruction, conferencing, and innovative ways to engage students in much higher levels of writing proficiency

Outstanding Strategies You Can Use Immediately

Here's what you'll learn:

• Innovative ways to help your students increase the quality of their writing and enable you to fit in all the ELA standards you are required to teach
• Practical, proven strategies to implement writing assessments in multiple writing genres
• Outstanding, ready-to-use ideas for integrating multimodal writing assignments with your current writing program
• How to get students more deeply engaged in the process of writing, leading to stronger finished products
• How to give targeted feedback that reduces grading time and increases student progress
• Proven tips for working more efficiently and effectively spending more time collaborating and creating, and less time grading
• How to increase students' confidence in writing and focus more on achieving substantive personal goals
• Proven ways to teach students to read and revise their writing using interactive rubrics that are much more than checklists
• Model lesson plans you can use or adapt to successfully integrate all the writing skills students need

A Message From Your Seminar Leader

Dear Colleague:

As a teacher, author and publisher, writing is a large part of my daily life. I have always loved teaching writing. Unfortunately, it is the first part of the language arts block to be cut from the day. In addition, teaching writing is often perceived as a daunting task. That's exactly why we created this seminar for teachers in Grades 3-6.

After almost two decades of teaching writing as a classroom teacher, reading specialist, and literacy consultant, I want every teacher to feel confident and competent in teaching writing. This not only includes simple ways to plan and implement engaging and effective daily writing lessons, but also time-saving tips on assigning and grading student writing. Research shows that students become great readers when daily writing experiences take place in the classroom.

My hope is that you will return to your classroom with a wealth of practical strategies, tips, and tools for teaching, assigning, and assessing writing that will immediately improve both your students' writing and reading success.

I look forward to meeting you at the seminar. The day will be packed with exciting new practices, strategies and perspectives that will enable you to teach and assess writing in creative new time-saving ways.

Sincerely,
Kathryn Starke

P.S. You will also receive an extensive digital resource handbook filled with practical, proven strategies, and time-saving
tools you can use immediately.

Who Should Attend

Educators Serving Grades 3-6: English/Language Arts Teachers, Classroom Teachers, Literacy Coaches, Special Education Staff and Administrators

About BER Live Online Events

With the current health challenges, all BER in-person PD events are currently being presented in a Live Online format:

• Outstanding Instructors
  All programs are led by outstanding BER national trainers
• Extensive Resource Handbooks
  You'll have access to an extensive digital Resource Handbook before, during and after your seminar
• Highly Interactive
  You'll be able to ask questions in real time and interact with the instructor and other participants
• Program Guarantee
  As we have for 48 years, we guarantee the high quality of our programs. If you are not satisfied, we'll give you a 100% refund.

Special Benefits of Attending

Extensive Digital Resource Handbook
Each participant will receive an extensive digital resource handbook giving you access to countless strategies. The handbook includes:

• Practical, ready-to-use strategies and techniques to strengthen student writing
• Motivational engagement strategies to increase participation and stamina in writing
• Effective, accessible resources for helping your students meet your state's standards for writing
• Powerful time-saving tools and strategies to increase your students' writing skills while reducing your grading time
• Sample lesson plans that will help you "fit it all in"

For in-person seminars, registrants will also receive a printed copy of the resource handbook as long as their registration is received in the BER office at least 15 calendar days before the event.

Share Ideas
This seminar provides a wonderful opportunity for participants to share ideas with other educators interested in enhancing their students' writing skills program.

Consultation Available
Kathryn Starke will be available for consultation regarding your questions and the unique needs of your own program.

Semester Credit Option
Up to four graduate level professional development credits are available with an additional fee and completion of follow-up practicum activities. Details for direct enrollment with University of Massachusetts Global, a nonprofit affiliate, will be available at this program.

Meet Inservice Requirements
Participants of both the Live Online Seminar and those completing the Recorded Version online can receive a certificate of participation that may be used to verify five continuing education hours. State CEUs are available for both versions of the course. For specific details, visit www.ber.org/ceus.

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