I started this morning as I begin nearly every weekday morning when my writing alarm goes off: throw on my oversized sweater, tiptoe down the stairs (being oh-so-careful to avoid the stairs’ creaks and cracks so my babies don’t wake up, rending my writing time null and void), hit the coffee maker’s switch, light the […]
Note: Today’s post marks the beginning of a new beat for winter–reducing decision fatigue in the writing classroom. So many of us pour our energy into lesson and unit prep, grading papers, reorganizing the classroom, setting up conferences and other writing teacherly tasks that we have very little energy to do the most important work […]
I’m interrupting my regular series this week to share a few writing ideas to round out the last week of the 2018-2019 school year. Many of us will struggle this week to hold the attention of our vacation-bound students, and while maintaining our regular schedule can be the perfect antidote to candy-crazed kids, spicing up […]
Today’s guest writer is Jennifer Brinkmeyer, who teaches Reading Strategies and U.S. Lit Honors in Iowa City, IA. Jennifer loves teaching students how to commit rebellious acts of literacy. She is constantly seeking ways to bring her writing life into the classroom to help students validate their own writing lives. Today, Jennifer shares about teaching […]
After the last installment of my four-part series on reading like a writer, I received a question from Lisa in Waunakee, WI about helping students better understand what they are doing in their own writing: “How to help students explain WHY/HOW an aspect of the piece (like a description, an added scene, a certain line, […]
This whole scaffolding series has been building up to this last post. Everything we do to teach kids how to read like writers is in preparation for the last leap: trying the craft in your own work. In literature heavy classrooms, teachers may skip this step: The peak of literary analysis instruction is teaching students […]
(Before diving in to today’s post, be sure to read the first and second posts in this four-post series about noticing and naming craft.) As we move deeper into the process of reading like a writer, we climb higher and higher on Bloom’s pyramid. After we notice and name craft, it’s time to consider why […]
Last week I began a series on scaffolds for helping students read like writers. To read like a writer is to appreciate what another writer has made while exploring possibilities for your own work. When students are surrounded by excellent writing and have been taught how to mine that writing for craft, their writing toolbox […]
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 […]
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 […]
