Can we agree that we hate the five paragraph essay? Every time I confer with a student who says, “Well, I have two body paragraphs, but I need one more”, I shudder. FIVE IS NOT A MAGIC NUMBER has become my mantra. I’m thinking about making a poster to hang in the front of my […]
Author: Rebekah O'Dell
“Writing Workshop Made Me a Writer”: A Student Spotlight
Writing workshop aims to foster independence and growth in the writing process. We teach and draft and revise and confer in the hopes that our students will end up in a different writing space by the end of the school year. To be honest, we can typically measure that growth in coffeespoons. That isn’t to […]
Mentor Text Wednesday: Moving Past Summary in Film Analysis
Mentor Text: “Captain America on the Potomac” by Linda Holmes for NPR. April 1, 2014. Skill Taught: Moving past summary in film analysis Background: My English 9s are working on an essay on the theme of a Pixar short film of their choosing as an entry point into the world of analytical, academic writing. The films are […]
The Power of Flash Drafting: Less Thinking, More Writing
I am very late to the flash draft party. It’s not a new concept. Ralph Fletcher mentions it in What a Writer Needs, and he attributes the concept to another teacher entirely. But I hadn’t heard about it until a Twitter chat last month when a group of elementary writing teachers raved about its power […]
Mentor Text Wednesday: Teaching Students to Write Meaningful Comparisons & Contrasts
Mentor Text: Bowman, Donna. “On the Eve of Its Finale, It’s Time to Compare How I Met Your Mother to Itself.” The A.V. Club. 30 March 2014. Skill: Teaching Students to Write Meaningful Comparions & Contrasts Background: My IB seniors are barreling toward their Big Exam. Truthfully, they have done so much heavy mental lifting in this course […]
Moving Students from Idea to Draft: a Sticky-Note Structure
Structure seems to be something young writers innately sense … or don’t. Those who don’t tend to have explosive bursts of thought, leaving word shrapnel all over the paper. To try to combat this, one of my first mini-lessons of the year is on brainstorming — hoping that if students write their ideas down somewhere, […]
Mentor Text Wednesday: Ken Tucker’s Review of Pharrell’s New Album
Mentor Text: Tucker, Ken. “Pharrell Williams: Just Exhilaratingly Happy”. 6 March 2014. npr.org. Technique: Using Figurative Language as Evidence Background: Ken Tucker read his review of Pharrell’s new album on Fresh Air as I drove home after work one Friday. “A MENTOR TEXT!” I screeched. (Literally.) And sometimes — the most wonderful times — we find mentor texts this […]
Connecting Writers’ Struggles to Mentor Text Solutions
I have recently found myself reinforcing (and re-teaching) the fundamentals of how to use a mentor text with my ninth graders. After our most recent unit, I asked students how many of them went back and looked at the mentor texts I provided on their own after we had used them in a mini-lesson. 56% […]
Mentor Text Wednesday: Concrete Details
Mentor Texts: “Has Snowboarding Lots Its Edge” by Christopher Solomon. The New York Times, 16 January 2013. “A Sports Star’s ‘Crash,’ Then The Search For A New Normal” by Ian Buckwalter. NPR, 4 July 2013. “Snowboarding”. Essayforum.com. “The Power of Snowboarding” by Jordan. ThisIBelieve.org, 15 December 2010. Writing Technique: Using concrete details Background: I am experimenting […]
Writing Our Way Into Critical Thinking
Way back one month ago, I made some resolutions for my classes. Among them was a switch-up that would turn the Quick Write into a broader Notebook Time — giving my students lots of varied opportunities to play with words in different ways. In short, switching things up has been invigorating for my students. I […]
moving writers 