In this school years last beat Abigail takes you through a writing strategy of “dream/vision boards” to cast a vision for the future with your students.
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Science Writing…For Kids!
Sodium Polyacrylate In science, my 4th graders are learning about the Law of Conservation of Matter after about a week of reviewing ideas around solids, liquids, and gases. Instead of doing the classic cornstarch and water lab, I decided to try something new this time around. If you go online, you can find packets of […]
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A Perfect Personification Mentor Text
Abigail takes us through a mentor text which has endless amount of uses. She gives you a quick guide to this perfect personification mentor and hopes you will try it out too.
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An Alternate Script for the Embarrassed Self
I’m very happy that my idea of creating Embarrassment Free Zones resonated with many teachers and students. My goal in this post is to establish that there are situations when Free Zones won’t work. Yes, that’s right.
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Turn Local History into Advocacy with Three Different Writing Projects
One of my biggest challenges as a teacher is getting students to feel connected to history. To them, especially at the middle school age, history might as well be the Milky Way– kids are told that it’s real and that they are a part of it, but the scope of history often has such galactical […]
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First Year Writing Teacher Support: Reserve Time for Revision
Hang in there, new teacher, you’re almost to the finish line. By this point in the school year, you’ve definitely had your students write a thing or two. So you now know that getting students to write perfectly polished drafts is a lot harder than meets the eye. I know when I first started teaching, […]
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Where Dystopian Fiction Meets Water Journalism
One way to help students become climate stewards is to model how reading paired climate texts enhances our ability to both problem-spot and problem-solve. In our haste to offer solutions, we may insufficiently consider the root causes of environmental problems. While reading Neal and Jarrod Shusterman’s novel Dry, my students and I pore over local […]
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“Letting Glow” Part Two: An Update on Our Independent Study
With one month left in the school year and just a few weeks remaining before my IB seniors take their exam, we are nearing the end of our independent studies, and I am excited by the results of this experiment! Earlier this week, students gathered in small discussion groups to talk about their independent study […]
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Graphic Novel Writing: A Breather Unit
A few posts ago, I wrote about what Beth Rimer calls “Breather Units.” A Breather Unit is a 2-3 week mini-unit in which a teacher engages in something lighter–or perhaps does a bit of review–after a deep and intense unit of study. Inspired by a Graphic Novel Writing unit Rebekah posted to the Moving Writers […]
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Need a break? Splash around in the contextual pool.
I’m writing this post during my SAT proctoring break and I’m exhausted. I just read mind-numbing directions for almost an hour, then checked calculators, then more directions, then watched kids bubble. I’m beat. And I didn’t even take the test! Maybe I’m getting soft in my old age, but I’m pretty sure that by Friday […]
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9 Mini-Moves for Argument Writing
One of the things I’m loving most about Mini Moves for Writers is how flexible the video lessons are — able to slide into so many different kinds of writing units and activities. For example, take the Scene Drop Intro. Writers could use this in a review, an op-ed, a profile, a personal essay. And […]
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An Epic Mentor: Social Media
This month @mrsablund takes you through the mentor our students know best… social media. How can we use this in our classrooms as writers? Read to find out!
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A Conversation that Nudges Students out of Embarrassment
If you’ve ever taught a bunch of self-conscious middle schoolers, you know that adolescents are perpetually embarrassed about anything and everything. You also know that they don’t just “get over it” when they realize that embarrassment is an impediment to their learning. In that state of biological and emotional upheaval, the rational voice (even when it exists) is drowned in the fear of embarrassment.
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Picture Book-Driven Inquiry: Picturing Survival with Octavia Butler
I’ve been eager to shake up my classroom literature circles. Sometimes, it is easy to fall into a routine rut: assign some chapters to be read, passages to be annotated, literary techniques to be identified. As we read Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, I thought about what it meant for Lauren Olamina to come […]
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First Year Writing Teacher Support: Your Moves Are Not Their Moves
As writing teachers, we’ve done our fair share of writing ourselves. We each have our own unique process, a set of strategies we’ve grown comfortable with from practice. If you’re new to teaching writing, that probably means you did a lot of writing recently in college. Your process is finely tuned; you’re likely a well-oiled […]
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Turn Local History into Advocacy with Three Different Writing Projects
One of my biggest challenges as a teacher is getting students to feel connected to history. To them, especially at the middle school age, history might as well be the Milky Way– kids are told that it’s real and that they are a part of it, but the scope of history often has such galactical […]
7 Ways to Get Students Writing about the War in Ukraine
Between this post and my last, a war began. And we shouldn’t be surprised. Like the rise of Nazi Germany after WWI, the conflict in Ukraine has been building for more than twenty years. Putin and his post-Soviet ancestors have been playing a game of Hungry Hippos with the Ukraine and former Soviet satellite states […]
No Dumb Questions: Using Inquiry to Drive Research
In his 1995 work, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, astrophysicist Carl Sagan wrote a sentence that would be uttered in classrooms around the world for decades to come: “there’s no such thing as a dumb question.” We’ll assume, of course, that Sagan is excluding the students in your class who […]
Ready to Find Love? Swipe Right on These Five Social Studies Writing Workshops
Choosing the right writing workshop (say that five times fast) at the right time in a content-based classroom will have a large impact on the success of your writing instruction. A workshop that is too complex or does not serve your class’s current needs could also derail your unit, resulting in total heartbreak for you and your students. Preview five, eligible workshops that will adapt to your curriculum and help your students write like historians.
Big Picture Writing: Things to Ponder
Thinking about our writing, big picture, helps us to think about who and how we want to be as people, and as we the people.
Mentor Text Wednesday: Pants: A Note
Mentor Text: Pants: A Note by Brian Doyle Techniques: Playing with conventions Expressing a single idea Using footnotes Background – This spring, I found myself really reflecting on the fact that I use a lot of heavy pieces in the classroom. I think we all do – they do the heavy lifting for us. They’re rich […]
The Value of Ambiguity
Sometimes, there isn’t one right answer. Sometimes it’s okay to admit we don’t know.
Dream Boards
In this school years last beat Abigail takes you through a writing strategy of “dream/vision boards” to cast a vision for the future with your students.
First Year Writing Teacher Support: Just Try It!
If you’re like me, you always have a project in the back of your mind that you want to try, but for whatever reason, you never pull the trigger. You keep telling yourself it will be a great project for the next unit, the next semester, the next year. But this is a warning for […]
Mentor Text Wednesday: 1944
Mentor Text: ‘1944’ excerpted from Gone to the Woods by Gary Paulsen Techniques: Memoir Narrator’s Voice Background – Though I have read numerous reflections and reports on Gary Paulsen’s books, particularly the Hatchet series, I had yet to read any of his work until this spring. My love of memoir and habitual checking of the recent […]
Learning From Poems: Comfort
It’s hard to believe I haven’t published a post here since January, but how the the wheels of time keep turning! And I hope you will excuse my absence, as I have been working on my biggest writing project ever: a book for teachers! The title is Poetry Pauses: Using Poems to Improve Writing in […]
Science Writing…For Kids!
Sodium Polyacrylate In science, my 4th graders are learning about the Law of Conservation of Matter after about a week of reviewing ideas around solids, liquids, and gases. Instead of doing the classic cornstarch and water lab, I decided to try something new this time around. If you go online, you can find packets of […]
A Perfect Personification Mentor Text
Abigail takes us through a mentor text which has endless amount of uses. She gives you a quick guide to this perfect personification mentor and hopes you will try it out too.
An Alternate Script for the Embarrassed Self
I’m very happy that my idea of creating Embarrassment Free Zones resonated with many teachers and students. My goal in this post is to establish that there are situations when Free Zones won’t work. Yes, that’s right.
moving writers 