Write on Weiser! - WOW!

“By writing much, one learns to write well.” – Robert Southey, 1774-1843, author

During the 2007-08 school year, the Weiser School District undertook a major initiative in grades K-12 to improve student writing, long recognized as one of the essential three R's in education. Writing has always been taught, but not in as comprehensive and coordinated fashion as the district has adopted.

Based on the 6+1 Traits of Writing program, the district's elementary and secondary language arts teachers developed a comprehensive writing curriculum for their classrooms that creates a common vocabulary for instruction and assessment of student writing.

The cornerstone of the district initiative is WOW! or Write on Weiser! Scheduled once in the fall and again in the spring, all of the district's students engage in a performance based writing assessment. Students write to a common prompt and their papers read and scored by at least two teachers who determine whether the paper demonstrates elements of writing that represent what a “proficient” writer would produce for that grade level. Using a rubric based on the 6+1 Traits of Writing, students receive feedback on their skills in writing in the following areas: organization, ideas, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, conventions (grammar), and presentation.

WOW! allows teachers to organize their discussions about what good writing looks like as well as recognize students for their achievements in writing.

Below are the Writing Curriculum Calendars for each grade -