With more than seventy-five years of combined teaching experience, Gretchen, Jayne, and Cynthia have made it their mission to craft writing lessons that are healthy for kids, promote lifelong literacy, and, coincidentally, help students blow the roof off of state test scores. In Crunchtime they share the fantastic results of this dynamic collaboration. Organized around the writing process--selecting topics, crafting drafts, and polishing finished pieces--explicit lessons engage student writers while shoring up the gaps between learning and testing. In addition to providing classroom-tested strategies that help students grow as writers, Gretchen, Jayne, and Cynthia also provide a wealth of crunchtime tools (rubrics, reproducibles, and writing samples) and minilessons that will help you teach strategically and position your students for success on their state writing tests and beyond. Book jacket.

Gretchen Bernabei, Jayne Hover, and Cynthia Candler have extensive experience teaching across the K-12 grade span. While teaching a broad range of students in very different settings, all three teachers share a passion for writing and a passion for teaching writing to young people. All three have also honed their teaching craft in an environment of high-stakes testing. In Crunchtime they share with you the strategies they have developed for helping students be successful in the literate world and on ""the test.""