A Lesson For Tomorrow: Sentence Study Last week Rebekah blogged about teaching students how to find and use mentor textsto increase their independence and cure their writing blues. She posted a fantastic chart that uses a problem-solution or if-then approach to guiding students to and through mentor texts. As her chart indicates, sometimes a mentor text is just […]
Author: Rebekah O'Dell
Top Ten of ’13-’14: #9
An Introduction to Mentor Text Wednesday Welcome to our very first Mentor Text Wednesday! Mentor texts are powerful in the hands of writers – they engage our students, they motivate our students, they guide our students, they inspire our students. We know they work. But finding mentor texts is a time-consuming task for teachers. I […]
Top Ten of 2013-2014: #10 (with bonus material!)
Allison and I are taking some time away from the blog this summer to work on other writing projects. We will be popping in and out periodically to share resources and new ideas as we plan for the 2014-2015 school year. In the meantime, each Monday for the next ten weeks we will share our […]
Reader Mail, Part 2: How Do You Plan for a Year of Writing Workshop?
We love reader mail! On Monday, we began our answer to Cassie’s brilliant query. Here is the second part of our answer: How do we build our workshops & the lessons that go in them? When we first started writing workshop, we religiously referred to a chart on page 13 of Write Beside Them: “Writing: […]
Reader Mail: How do you begin the writing workshop year?
Below is a recent email we received: I am a second year ELA teacher with seniors from Ohio and a huge fan of Moving Writers. After completing my first year of teaching I realized direct instruction, novel unit comprehension questions and crosswords, and assigning writing was not working in my classroom. I spent last summer […]
2.5 Successes and a Failure
It’s June. My students will leave my classroom this week. They hope they will be successful on their exams. I hope they will take their writer’s notebooks with them and not leave them in my room, or in a locker or, God forbid, in a nearby trashcan. As I look back on this school year, […]
Mentor Text Wednesday: Mentors for Writing, Mentors for Coping
We use mentors to help students become better writers. We want these mentors to teach them and inspire them and moving their writing forward in ways that our mini-lessons and conferences alone could not accomplish. But we also want to use mentors to help students develop a thriving and lasting writing life. If writing is […]
Year-End Digital Writing Portfolio
As our students end the year, they are preparing their final assessment — a portfolio of their work this year. Writing portfolios are nothing new, but as we thought about how we should structure the portfolio and what it should include, we considered, Since our students have submitted all of their work digitally this year, […]
An End-of-the-Year Mentor Text Workshop
You know those last two weeks of school when you feel like you’re in limbo? It’s not enough time to start another unit, and yet what to do during class while students are prepping for exams and compiling writing portfolios? I am spending two weeks (nine, 45-minute class periods) on a workshop on mentor […]
Dabbling in Standards-Based Writing Assessment
Teaching writing is not for the faint-hearted. Assessing writing is even less so. For years, I have struggled in vain to find the perfect system — “objective” one-size-fits-all trait-based rubrics, rubrics I have created, rubrics my students have created. None ever seems to accurately measure what I see in a student’s writing. And while I […]
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