e-Book Ready-To-Use English Workshop Activities for Grades 6-12: 180 Daily Lessons for Integrating Literature, Writing, and Grammar download

The concept of this book sounds good on the surface: bite-sized chunks of literature to analyze, day by day. Where is fails horribly, however, is in the author's AWFUL choice of "literature". Be forewarned: in seven years of developing curricula and teaching writing, I have never seen worse writing samples to analyze in something that purports to have an education mission than what Ledbetter includes here. I have rarely been so disappointed by the kind of poorly-written junk using street language and obnoxious themes as this author picked in a misguided attempt to interest bored pre-teens and teens in writing. It got so bad that I gave up only halfway through the book. Here are some examples:
1. Is "Suck it up" a phrase kids need to analyze as part of teaching them to write better? (page 59, Latchmiepersad, Viandra, "How To Be A Teacher's Pet");
2. "...We go to school seven hours a day, five days a week, for almost forty weeks a year, just so that after we have agonized over all the in-class work, we can go home to do some more of that finger-cramping, eyes-squinting, brain-teasing labor that Mrs. Know-It-All calls homework." (p. 58, Shannon, Jessica, "Play Time").
3. "He said we weren't the couple we used to be. He said we were through..." (Holmes, Rebecca, "Hand In Hand");
4. "...Just when we thought we had our moms pegged, they'd ground us for feeding FooFoo, our poor, overfed kitty, too many cat cakes--or whatever they're called. They our dads would go off the wall because their sacred TV remotes were moved to the other side of their equally sacred couches..." (p. 93, Whitaker, Jared, "Moms and Dads");
5. "...my father would contribute to one thing, the TV..." (Pelt, Gregg, "The TV Remote";
6. "Let's face it--neither teachers nor students have handwriting that anyone can read..." (p. 68, Kohles, Brad, "Artifacts and Brats").

The list goes on and on. The themes of the samples are confined to how much kids hate their parents, how lame those parents are, a few overheated boyfriend-girlfriend problems, and a few "normal" themes written by poor writers with clunky phrases and lousy vocabulary.
While it may be that some children don't have a capacity or patience to read even a short excerpt of good writing and literature, the VAST majority would benefit greatly from exposure to real, classic literature about the greater, far more meaningful themes of life, from our own great American writers and poets to the great world literature we can call enjoy. Choosing this abysmally low level of junk and labeling it "literature" to analyze is an insult to their intelligence and potential, and a grave disservice to any pupil asked to read this awful stuff. And like cheap junk food, while the rebellious among them might briefly enjoy the obnoxious statements and low-brow themes in most of these pieces, it will not feed their minds or imaginations in the slightest, and will leave them empty and bloated.

This book is an embarrassment to its compiler, a disgrace to anyone calling themselves an English educator, and should be avoided at all costs. I'd give it zero stars if I could.

The activities are ok, sometimes a bit close-ended.

The biggest problem is that the Kindle version of this book doesn't have a table of contents with hyperlinks, thus navigating is either with location (difficult because it doesn't have page numbers and the contents doesn't list location) or by swiping.

Also, there doesn't seem to be any clear organizational theme. The exercises are described at the beginning but listed in haphazard order. It would make way more sense to organize them by the primary skill being emphasized or by the particular type of 'daily.'

All in all, disappointing, both on the short-sightedness of whoever formatted the Kindle version and the author.

We have very detailed language standards and this book was awesome with preparing students for our state assessments and regular grammar assessments. Love it. I use transparencies for the week, and parcel out the information weekly. Meaning I can use one page/sheet per week. You can break the information down to however you need it.

ETA: I wanted to clarify that I use this for my warm-up activities and for my EOG (End of Grade) test prep sessions. I can expand on the topics and key points to my own liking, and it forces students to read material (told from their perspective), review or learn new English terms and techniques, and find techniques (i.e. metaphors, similes) and ask students to use context clues to determine/find quotes, etc.

To those of you who may consider buying the Kindle edition, please be advised that the font is barely legible in the Kindle Reader for Mac/PC and the Kindle reader on an iPad. Why? The publisher elected to use a playful font - almost cursive - that doesn't render itself as text in a Kindle but rather, as an image. This means you can't enlarge it and you're stuck with tiny 8/9 pt text. Shame on the publisher.

The fonts were too strange and I couldn't comfortably read it at all.. I wasted money on nothing. Do not buy.

Difficult to follow and not set up for anyone not highly linear in thinking. I couldn't even finish the read.

Was not what I expected. I personally misjudged the content.

I used this book during the latter half of the school year, and wished that I had started sooner. The glossary of terms is so easy to use, and students can refer to it immediately without having that lost look on their faces.
It's a great class starter for that punch of grammar without it looking like those boring grammar drills we went through in school.
The material is very relevant to teenagers, and the sample work is written by students themselves which gives my students more confidence to write.
I plan on using this at the beginning of the year, and carrying on throughout the year.
Highly recommended if you're floundering over those class starters.