Writing Openers and Fluency Toolkit provides two essential resources for upper elementary, middle school, and high school teachers. The first series of resources consists of four sets of interactive writing “openers.” These ten-minute lessons, formatted for your SMART board™ or overhead/LCD projector, have corresponding student worksheets and comprise a full year curriculum. Students practice sentence combining, sentence variety with different grammatical sentence constructions, the rules of writing style, transitions, and manipulation of the writing domains (genres) and forms to increase writing fluency, dexterity, and complexity. These openers are designed with the busy teacher in mind—no prep is needed and students self-correct.

The second resource in this book provides eight on-demand essays based upon the Common Core Writing Standards. Each on-demand writing task has a short, connected reading passage and graphic organizer. Here is exactly what this toolkit offers:

*Sentence Revisions. Get 64 Sentence Revision writing “openers” to teach sentence combining, sentence manipulation, and grammatical sentence models. Lessons are formatted for your SMART board™ or overhead/LCD projector and require no advance preparation. Students write down the writing rule or skill on the worksheet; the teacher leads an interactive discussion with the example sentences (teacher tips provided, of course); then students complete the quick sentence writing task and self-correct from the answers.
*Writing Style Rules. Get 24 Writing Style Rules “openers” to teach all of the guidelines for the formal essay. Using the same instructional design as that of the Sentence Revisions, these lessons use humorous writing samples to demonstrate each of the writing style rules. Students read and interpret the rule with teacher assistance and then revise the writing sample.
*Writing Domain and Form Openers. Get teacher tips and resources to introduce the four writing domains: Imaginative/Narrative, Sensory/Descriptive, Practical/Informative, and Analytical/Persuasive. Get four practice exercises to manipulate the writing domains and forms of literary passages.
*Transition Words and Phrases Openers. Get a comprehensive list of writing transition words and phrases, categorized by definition. Using the same instructional design as that of the Sentence Revisions, students write down the transition word or phrase. Then, students write a three-sentence paragraph (topic sentence and two detail sentences) to include the transition word or phrase.
*On-Demand Writing Fluencies. Get eight timed on-demand assessments with accompanying reading passages and graphic organizers for writing fluency practice. Holistic and analytical rubrics allow the teacher to formatively assess individual progress and prepare students for standardized essay tests. Each of the eight on-demand essays based upon the Common Core Writing Standards. 118 pages

Materials in the Writing Openers and Fluency Toolkit have been selected from the comprehensive curriculum: Teaching Essay Strategies, by the same author (available at TpT), and include content of this book, 42 sequenced essay strategy worksheets, remedial writing worksheets, mini-lessons, and 64 rhetorical stance quick writes. Everything the writing teacher needs to teach students to write coherent and unified essays is provided in this systematic, standards-based curriculum.