“The Writer’s Toolbox” – Laura Harper

I love the connections that Harper made to Barry Lane. This article really helped me to see how his techniques, strategies, and tools have been used by another teacher in their classroom. The connections she made with Lane helped me to understand his material even more deeply.
Harper talks about how she used Lane’s strategies of Questions, Snapshots, Thoughtshots, Exploding a Moment, and Building a Scene to build a literal “toolbox” for each of her students. After introducing each strategy, she would have the students write down information about the strategy, including a picture that had been decided on by the class to depict that particular strategy. Then, the cards were all kept in a manila envelope in the student’s writing folder. This was such a useful idea to share with other teachers! It makes me wish I was teaching Title I reading again (for about 30 seconds) so that I could utilize this idea more fully than I can in the Kindergarten room.