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Teaching students to write well is one of the most important tasks of an ELA class, yet many teachers struggle to implement writing instruction effectively, relying instead on outdated formulas that produce uninspired compositions. Despite a desire among educators to improve writing instruction, obstacles exist that make this task difficult. 

Artfulness overcomes the two biggest challenges teachers face when seeking to improve writing instruction: time and knowledge. 

• Artfulness saves teachers time by providing a year’s worth of effective, ready-to-use lesson plans for writing that can easily be adapted to suit any classroom environment. With unit integration suggestions, differentiation strategies, and lesson extension ideas, this book provides everything teachers need to develop writing lessons that work. 
• Artfulness takes the struggle out of lesson planning by designing each of the twenty lesson plans in the book to specifically target core ELA skills. More than a tool to teach writing, many of the lessons in Artfulness are deliberately paired with key close reading skills, leading students to become stronger readers as well as stronger writers. 

Through the integration of weekly creative writing explorations known as Writing Wednesdays, students discover the joy—and the artfulness—of writing in modes that feel authentic and meaningful to them. The results speak for themselves—students who engage in the Writing Wednesday lessons contained in Artfulness often write longer, more effective compositions than they did previously and express an excitement about writing that was missing before.