Teaching young adolescent students to read, write, and talk intelligently about writing need not be the overwhelming task it poses for new to middle school teachers. They may be recent graduates or experienced teachers transitioning from elementary or high school classrooms. Moreover, designing lessons for which students write regularly for real purposes, but will not overburden the teacher with grading often swamps early career educators and veterans alike. These teachers will find in this book accounts of specific ways to establish a nurturing classroom environment with grading guidelines that are firm and fair; for designing writing assignments that include specific steps to adapt or adopt to fit their own student population, with samples of formative and summative assessments to measure student growth in writing; for selecting mentor texts that are culturally relevant serving both as inspiration and patterns for students from various cultural, ethnic, and economic regions across the nation.