Teaching with Writelike ARCHIVED NOV 2023

You can sort lessons by text type and sub-type, but at the moment most of the lessons are about narrative and its various sub-types (recount, history, etc).

Writelike has three types of lesson:

• Introduction lessons curate selected snippets to illustrate a text type, genre or grammatical feature
• Detailed practice lessons focus on a single passage, usually breaking it into chunks and then modelling each chunk before recombining
• Remix lessons are a more casual format, asking students to write about one stimulus in multiple styles

We suggest starting with easy introduction lessons such as the Expressive Punctuation series, which teaches skills that can be applied immediately. 

Other good options are Narrative Basics, Memoir Basics, or any of the Remix lessons, which are meant to be like fun party pieces.

We classify lessons into broad year level ranges:

• Middle years: grades 6-9
• Young adult: grades 9-12
• General: adult audiences

There's a lot of overlap here. Suitability really depends on the ability level and background of the class. A young adult lesson might work for a middle years class and vice versa. 

We'd suggest using year levels as a rough guide only, and taking a look at the lesson checkpoint to more accurately assess the level of difficulty.

You can pinpoint lessons based on genre, topic and author, but given the current relatively modest number of lessons, it's probably easier just to browse.

Writelike lessons are text first, curriculum second. This means we retroactively map lessons to standards, but it's challenging because most lessons touch multiple standards and it's hard to know where to draw the line.

You can search for a standard in Browse and see which lessons have been mapped to that standard, or you can view all standards mapped to a lesson. However, as with year level ranges, the devil is in the detail and you really need to look at the lesson description and checkpoint to assess if it is right for your needs.

Lessons have been mapped against ACARA (Australia) and Common Core (US).

Before assigning any lesson, we'd suggest skimming over:

• The lesson description
• Checkpoints, if any
• The table of contents

That should tell you if you want to assign it.

If you assign a lesson, it pays to do the lesson yourself and to take notes while you do so.

That's not a trivial amount of work, but it's the best way to understand the details of the lesson as well as any questions or difficulties that are likely to come up.