Rationale
Our current writing curriculum is specifically focused on nonfiction writing. It is not a curriculum that has been very popular at our school, at any grade-level, for various reasons. One major issue is the strong emphasis on mentor texts, but as is often the case in education, limited finances have left the provision of mentor texts largely to the classroom teacher. Most classroom teachers are equally limited financially, and even when possessing the funds have limited time, opportunity, and experience required to locate additional mentor texts. This is particularly true at the elementary level where writing is just one area of advanced preparation required of the classroom teacher.
I am never a proponent of a “one size fits all” approach to anything educational but there is a benefit to having a bank of educational resources available for the time crunched educator. In fact, much time has gone into banking many resources for reading and math for those purposes but somehow writing has gotten pushed off the plate a bit.
Our old statewide writing program had anchor papers and rubrics for teachers to share with students but they were set aside when we went from handwritten state testing to online only programs. We still utilize the rubrics but teachers are expected to know how to select mentor texts instead of using anchor papers. Having students work across grade levels to share mentor text-based writing builds in differentiation while giving immediate audience to our writers.
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