Thank you for responding! This is a very exciting topic with us. I could spend a lot of time here, but I have just a few minutes.

We are working with Inverness and Mark St. John on this project (as our evaluators) with a special funding from a regional foundation to complement the LSC. Mark talks about a symboiotic relationship with writing and science. I absolutely agree.

I participated in our local version of the National Writing Project here a decade ago. One of the big ideas I learned was that sustained writing deepens thinking about the topic being written about as well as increases writing skills. Another big idea is that when children are provided specific, effective scaffolding or structures, then their writing can improve greatly vs. just asking them to free write or giving rather loose directions.

In my journey I found a teacher who became frustrated because there was nothing out their for expository writing. She was in the LSC as a 5th grade teacher for three years. She started developing these ideas in her class around the 5th grade science units. She is now an SRT and focuses almost 100% on expository writing in science. It is interesting that she has a masters in English from the UW and earlier in her life was an editor in the field of life science.

She has blossomed in this work and now has reached almost 60% of the almost 1000 teachers in our program at least with one class. With the special small grant, she works with a group of 21 Science Writing Lead Teachers as well. She has also developed a supplementary curriculum -- ideas and focus questions for every lesson in everyone of our 18 units.

Having this other avenue, writing, for attracting Lead Teachers has brought many more teachers to focus intensely than we would have otherwise attracted. This is a big benefit for sustainability, i.e., to attract strong teachers who would not have participated so intensely if it had only been science. Also, we have the Science Resource Teacher who specializes in the units she will address come to the writing class. That way they can interject specific things about how the writing works with the content, etc. This way, these teachers get a little bit extra about the science - a double exposure -- the science and the writing.

Secondly, teachers like to come to these classes because they are "hitting more birds with one stone" so to speak. Writing instruction is something almost every teacher needs to improve, and especially expository writing as there is very little support out there already in this area of writing for elementary.

If teachers see that they can use the science writing for part of their writing program, they are more likely to teach science and use the Science Notebook (which we provide to them for free.)

I hope this helps to answer your question.

Elaine