Quick Blurb About My Fall Beat As Rebekah mentioned in her back-to-school series introductory post, each of us will be dedicating a lot of our thinking and writing to a particular “beat” during the fall semester. There may be days we blog outside of our beat simply because another idea or experiment has risen to the […]
Over the years, I’ve probably revised my writing lesson plans more times than I’ve moved classrooms, and through that, I’ve come to learn that some of my best writing instruction is rooted right back where my reading instruction takes place: my classroom library.
I found it difficult to narrow down the multiple facets that are currently saving my life at the start of this school year. There are so many little pieces constructing the giant puzzle of my teaching and personal world. My first idea: Why team teaching with your best friend is highly recommended – shout out […]
I think it’s safe to say that if you’re visiting us here at Moving Writers, you’re probably the sort of teacher who enters a new school year with a sense of adventure and possibility. I’m also going to guess that you already seek the positive in your students and offer all sorts of wonderful opportunities […]
We’d all be perfect teachers if we had our students all day, every day, and English was their only class. Then we would have time to do all the things. We could use every single smart idea we found on Twitter. We could perfectly balance reading and writing and vocabulary study. We could study every […]
Teaching has so much in common with baseball, it’s crazy. I could go on and on about curveballs, errors, data analytics–and that only skims the surface. Seriously, don’t get me started. That said, I do want to drill into one little area of comparison between the two entities: success, in baseball and at school, involves […]
Something that saved my life this summer vacation was Slow Mondays, a day I instituted as a solution to my massive FOKMO–Fear of (My) Kids Missing Out–problem. Every Monday our huge summer bucket list mocked me from the playroom walls as I stood at the sink, my hands swishing around in the soapy water. “How […]
Happy New Year, friends! We hope you are rested and excited for a new school year! We are excited for a new blogging year, too! This year on Moving Writers, you’ll see a couple of new faces (our friend Noah Waspe (@mrwteach) and the amazing, intrepid Kristin Bond (@ReadWriteMore). And you’ll also see more cohesive, […]
Y’all, it wasn’t even close. Doubling the number of views gained by our other most-popular posts is our #1 post from Hattie (@TeacherHattie): “Why This / Not That: A Thinking Routine to Move Kids from Identification to Analysis”. Enjoy! ____________________________________________________________________________________________ One of the biggest challenges in teaching rhetorical analysis is teaching kids to move beyond identification […]
I think my colleagues have learned not to bring up “the research paper” with me lest I start on a tear about how research is in every kind of writing, and researching is important but research papers aren’t, etc. I really feel strongly about it, though! All writers need to know how to gather and use research, […]
Halloween in July, anyone? Last October, Allison treated us to six ideas for spooky writing. Make a note in your planner now to pull these out next October — spread them throughout the month! Or, really, use them anytime. Because all the adolescents I know love to be scared! ____________________________________________________________________________________________ Lately my son’s favorite activity […]
Last summer, Moving Writers did an Ask Moving Writers series. A question we got again and again dealt with giving hundreds of students meaningful feedback while still teaching. And sleeping. In our 4th most popular post of 2017-2018, Tricia Ebarvia tackles this question! ____________________________________________________________________________________________ Hi, Elizabeth! First, thank you for asking this important question! We […]
In January, Moving Writers did a series on test preparation and writing instruction. How do we prepare our students for the realities of the tests they will need to take while also being faithful to what we know is good for kids and their writing? One of those posts struck a cord with teachers; Hattie […]
Just in time for National Poetry Month, we shared a little writing unit studying and creating InstaPoetry — the super-visual tiny poems that have become so popular on Instagram and other social media. While this is a fantastic way to celebrate National Poetry Month, this would also be a perfect beginning-of-year unit as you introduce your […]
Over time, I become increasingly convinced that the more choice students have, the more magic you’ll get. To give students myriad opportunities to craft the writing they care about, I instituted writing homework this year — 20 minutes per night of completely independent, free-choice writing. Our #7 post of the year looks at the structures […]
Quick Blurb About My Fall Beat As Rebekah mentioned in her back-to-school series introductory post, each of us will be dedicating a lot of our thinking and writing to a particular “beat” during the fall semester. There may be days we blog outside of our beat simply because another idea or experiment has risen to the […]
Over the years, I’ve probably revised my writing lesson plans more times than I’ve moved classrooms, and through that, I’ve come to learn that some of my best writing instruction is rooted right back where my reading instruction takes place: my classroom library.
I found it difficult to narrow down the multiple facets that are currently saving my life at the start of this school year. There are so many little pieces constructing the giant puzzle of my teaching and personal world. My first idea: Why team teaching with your best friend is highly recommended – shout out […]
I think it’s safe to say that if you’re visiting us here at Moving Writers, you’re probably the sort of teacher who enters a new school year with a sense of adventure and possibility. I’m also going to guess that you already seek the positive in your students and offer all sorts of wonderful opportunities […]
“I’m crying in the middle of this Panera Bread”: not a comment I imagined I might need to add to a bank!
We’d all be perfect teachers if we had our students all day, every day, and English was their only class. Then we would have time to do all the things. We could use every single smart idea we found on Twitter. We could perfectly balance reading and writing and vocabulary study. We could study every […]
Last year on day two, my AP Language students threw me for a loop. I had asked them to do some writing as summer work and our team of teachers had decided we’d conference with the students about the pieces rather than grade them. Conferences in the first week of school seemed like the perfect […]
Today’s guest post from Kristen Bond (@readwritemore) is PERFECT for the beginning-of-the-school-year wading into writing that most of us do with our students! Why not start the year with a poem and beautiful reading of it? Here’s a bit about Kristen: My name is Kristin Bond and I work at the American Community School of Abu […]
Teaching has so much in common with baseball, it’s crazy. I could go on and on about curveballs, errors, data analytics–and that only skims the surface. Seriously, don’t get me started. That said, I do want to drill into one little area of comparison between the two entities: success, in baseball and at school, involves […]
I teach Grade 9 to 12 English thematically. If you teach middle years, this isn’t that radical an approach, I know, but it’s different for high school. For over a decade, most English teams I’ve worked with have done this alongside me. It’s a lifesaver for many reasons. Giving each course an overarching theme gives […]
