The Trait Crate®: Grade 7 Mentor Texts, Model Lessons, and More to Teach Writing With the 6 Traits

In this amazing kit, writing expert Ruth Culham gives you grade-perfect mentor texts with in-depth lessons to help you teach the traits of writing--ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, and conventions. The seventh-grade version includes: 6 mentor texts: After Ever After by Jordan Sonnenblick; The Boy Who Dared by Susan Campbell Bartolli; Oh My Gods by Megan E. Bryant; A Drop of Water by Walter Wick; Music of the Dolphins by Karen Hesse; Henry's Freedom Box by Ellen Levine 6 16-page teaching guides, each with four model lessons, student reproducibles, a scoring rubric, and extension activities; A CD with mentor-text passages, whiteboard activities, and student reproducibles 6 teaching posters perfect for middle school. Add to this Culham's best-selling professional book, Using Mentor to Teach Writing With the Traits, and color-coded stickers, and you've got a complete resource for teaching with the traits. Best of all, these materials are organized in a sturdy box with hanging folders--one for each trait--for easy, expandable storage that will accommodate trait-based lesson materials for years to come. For use with Grade 7.

Ruth Culham, Ed.D., is the president of the Culham Writing Company and former Unit Manager of the Assessment Program at Education Northwest in Portland, Oregon. She is the recognized expert in the traits of writing field and author of many professional resources published by Scholastic, including 6+1 Traits of Writing: The Complete Guide, Grades 3 and Up; 6+1 Traits of Writing: The Complete Guide for the Primary Grades; and Traits of Writing: The Complete Guide for Middle School, winner of the 2011 Teacher’s Choice award.

As a pioneering researcher in this field, Ruth creates and conducts teacher workshops to provide professional development at local, district, and state levels; at state and national conferences she’s a featured speaker on teaching writing using the traits. The highlight of her 19-year teaching career was being named English Teacher of the Year in Montana. But most recently, she’d proudest of authoring Traits Writing, a revolutionary writing program for grades K-8 available from Scholastic.