The Stack The Deck Writing Program

Age Range: 6-Adult
Author: The Stack The Deck Writing Program
Cost: For book prices, click here

Publisher: The Stack The Deck Writing Program
Phone:1-800-253-5737

Publisher's Description:

The heart of The Stack the Deck Writing Program is teaching four sentence manipulatory skills ­ combining, rearranging, subtracting, and expanding. Mastery of these skills will not only improve your students' syntactic fluency but also provide them with a writer's vocabulary that will aid them in revising a composition.

The Explore the Deck Teacher Resource Book is a complete text for primary teachers who are committed to teaching writing skills to their first and/or second graders for forty to sixty minutes per day. Explore not only includes suggestions for daily writing activities but also strategies for long range projects.

The Discover the Deck student writing book thoroughly guides young authors through every phase of the writing process. Written by Gary Kass and Len Tomasello from Fairfield and Weston, Connecticut, Discover covers the four major writing modes: narrative, persuasive, expository, and descriptive. Each phase of the writing process--prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, conferencing, and publishing--is taught in a style that makes sense to young children.

Geared for third or fourth grade students, Check the Deck includes eight units covering the major writing modes, plus literature-based writing and a research unit. Each unit includes four components leading up to a process-oriented assignment. Oral language activities, sentence combining techniques, a functional composing rule, and writing with style activities serve as mini-lessons before each prompt. A scoring rubric, think sheet, and checklist sheet are provided for each writing prompt.

Organized like Check the Deck, Flip the Deck provides a variety of writing skills to improve sentence style and paragraph development. Students work together in preparing many of the assignments. Six units provide enough materials to serve as writing activities for an entire year. Each writing prompt includes a scoring rubric. Students learn to focus by brainstorming on specially designed think sheets. An SOS sheet and checklist sheets help with revision.

Tap the Deck integrates sentence combining techniques into process-oriented writing assignments. Students learn to focus on their topic and support general ideas with specific details while narrating, explaining, arguing, and describing. Besides oral language and sentence combining units, young writers practice ten major writing assignments. Scoring rubrics in the teacher's manual are provided for each prompt.

Open the Deck is geared for middle school students. Eight units cover all aspects of writing. Each unit begins with oral language activities, moves onto sentence combining skills, and culminates with a process-oriented writing assignment. Students practice narrating, explaining, arguing, and describing essays, a writing across the curriculum topic, and a famous American report.

Targeted for 8th or 9th graders, Cut the Deck teaches seven major writing assignments covering all the major modes of writing. Sentence manipulatory skills--combining, rearranging, subtracting, and expanding--are featured throughout the text. Students enjoy the humor of the sentence writing skills activities and the progress that they see they are making. The ideas are functional and practical. Four labor saving devices make teaching the writing process manageable.

The original book in the series, Stack the Deck could be used as the core high school writing textbook. This practical in-class composition book demystifies writing. It stacks the deck for student success beginning with sentence manipulatory skills all the way to writing about literature. Writing across the curriculum topics abound with the major organizational patterns.

Master the Deck is geared for at-risk and adult education students-- those with serious writing problems. Master moves from teaching students how to write good sentences all the way through composing narratives, persuasive essays, letters, memos, and a job search. The book's purpose: help remedial students pass the GED or state writing competency.

Fan the Deck is written primarily for college-bound high school students who demonstrate a clear proficiency in writing. It builds style and more sophisticated sentence skills--coordination and subordination. It develops the writer's awareness of his audience, and the kind of thinking and organization for college level writing. The major writing assignments are those which students will be required to write in other academic classes and college courses.

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Howard J. Bender, Ph.D.
President
The Education Process Improvement Center, Inc.
P.O. Box 186
Riverdale, Maryland 20738
hjbender@epicent.com