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Nonfiction for Middle School

A Sentence-Composing Approach

By Donald Killgallon, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Jenny Killgallon, Maryvale Preparatory School, Maryland

The Killgallons provide the scaffolding students need to build strong sentences and paragraphs, as well as to interpret challenging brief nonfiction texts. With recognizable nonfiction authors as their mentors, students learn skills and build confidence as their reading and writing become more meaningful and masterful.

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ISBN 978-0-325-06289-1 / 0-325-06289-7 / SKU E06289
2016 / 224pp / Paperback
Grade Level: 6th-8th

Topics: Nonfiction, Writing

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Full Description

Don and Jenny Killgallon's sentence-composing approach helps students all across America develop into more proficient and sophisticated writers. Now in this powerful worktext, the Killgallons use their highly effective method to help students become better readers and writers of nonfiction.

Nonfiction for Middle School: A Sentence Composing Approach offers varied practice in building better sentences and paragraphs by modeling the sentence structures of well-known authors, including Diane Ackerman, David McCullough, Gary Paulsen, John Krakauer, Tracy Kidder, Erik Larson, Anna Quindlen, Laura Hillenbrand, Phillip Hoose, Rebecca Skloot, and many others.

Using the activities in the worktext, students—

• learn the meanings of words in the context of nonfiction selections, promoting deep reading skills
• learn and apply valuable tools for writing—the identifier, the describer and the elaborator—for variety in sentence structure
• imitate the sentence and paragraph structure of mentor authors from a wide variety of short nonfiction pieces.

The Killgallons provide the scaffolding students need to build strong sentences and paragraphs, as well as to interpret challenging nonfiction texts. With recognizable nonfiction authors as their mentors, students learn skills and build confidence as their reading and writing become more meaningful and masterful.

Additional Resource Information

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Introduction to the Sentence-Composing Approach

In Depth

Nonfiction for Middle School: A Sentence-Composing Approach challenges students to become more competent readers and writers of nonfiction. To reach that goal, this worktext scaffolds thinking, reading, and composing activities based upon the practice of current and past nonfiction authors.

With an increasing emphasis on nonfiction in English language arts classes, and with an already crowded curriculum, Nonfiction for Middle School: A Sentence-Composing Approach features mini-nonfiction: mostly sentences, paragraphs, and excerpts from longer works—a sampler of various kinds of nonfiction. These are grouped into sections within the worktext, which can be treated as units of study and integrated within the regular curriculum on an occasional basis—for example, a nonfiction day, week, month—or perhaps a half-year’s program.

Within Nonfiction for Middle School, all three major strands of an English language arts program are addressed: interpreting, composing, and language.

— From the chapter Nonfiction: Interpreting, Composing, Language