The Stack The Deck Writing Program

Age Range: 8-Adult
Platforms: Windows, DOS, and Mac
Medium: Diskette
Cost: $139.00

Company: The Stack the Deck Writing Program
Phone: 800-253-5737

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.

Computer software programs are available for Check the Deck, Flip the Deck, Tap the Deck, Open the Deck, Cut the Deck, and Stack the Deck for all supported word processors on Macintosh, Windows, and MS-DOS computers.

Activity files deal with sentence combining, rearranging, subtracting, and expanding-skills that are often difficult to do on paper but ones that make word processing famous. Write activities take an assignment through the entire writing process--narrative, persuasive, and expository.

Teachers, parents, students, and siblings use Stack the Deck software at home and at school when purchased by your school site. Make copies for an unlimited number of stand-alone computers. Place the software on your school site network. Use the programs in lesson planning and homework assignments.

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 narrative, persuasive, and expository 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.

For information on The Stack The Deck Writing Workshops, click here

For information on The Stack The Deck Writing Program folders and posters, click here

For information on The Stack The Deck Writing Program books, click here

For further information on the software, click here

We hope you found what you needed on this page. If you have any questions or comments, please contact me.



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