With Saint Patrick’s Day, Easter, and the advent of spring, greeting cards are abound in our house. Perhaps most exciting of all are the blue cards with storks and animals that continue to show up in anticipation of our first baby’s arrival in early May! All of these cards, lined up along the sill above our kitchen sink, got […]
Author: Allison Marchetti
Mom, Teacher, Writer, Postpartum Doula.
Books: Writing with Mentors & Beyond Literary Analysis (Heinemann)
Reading and Writing Workshop: The Essentials of Getting Organized
I found Rebekah’s visual guide to planning for writing workshop tremendously helpful, and I know many of you did, too. In an effort to be transparent and share the systems that work for us, this week I am going to write a little bit about the various organizational tools that help my workshops run more smoothly […]
Sequencing and Scaffolding Writing Studies
Whether you work with students for two years or are searching for an effective way to organize writing instruction in your classroom, you have no doubt thought about sequencing your writing studies so they build on one another. This year I have the privilege of teaching a group of 8th graders whom I will also […]
Questions to Help You Choose Mentor Texts
Do you remember Captain’s Choice? Those moments standing on the field during gym class as the boys and girls carefully selected players for their teams? We can still see their eyes darting back and forth as they sized up their potential teammates. For some of them it was – and still is – serious business. […]
Helping Students Find True Writing Mentors
What have you read that is like what you want to write? I posed this question on an introductory survey to a group of creative writers. Most of them responded with a list of the genres in which they wanted to write — short stories, poems, blogs — but only a few of them named […]
Meaningful Revision in Five Days
Tara Smith of Two Writing Teachers once posed the idea of an in-between study, a study that occurs during the brief pause at the end of one unit and the beginning of another. In the middle of December, I found myself with an extra week before exams began — not quite enough time to start something […]
What am I doing now? How might I do it better?
My dominant emotion during the holiday season is gratitude with a lot of reflection mixed in. As I wrap gifts, bake treats for neighbors, stand in line at the the post office, assemble holiday cards, vacuum the fallen needles under the tree, my mind wanders from family to school to the new year. What am […]
Finding Time for Technology in Writing Workshop
I think my students would tell you that our classroom is a happy, productive place. They would also tell you that it’s predictable. Monday through Thursday, we write during notebook time, read mentor texts and take notes during the lesson, and write and confer during workshop. We do this for 46 minutes four times a […]
NCTE 2014 : Sneak Preview #1
Rebekah and I are gearing up for NCTE 2014 in just a few weeks! This week’s post is a special preview of our presentation: Moving the Writer: Embracing a Vision for a Technique-Driven Workshop. Here is the description printed in the convention program: What does it take to move the writer and not just the writing? […]
Whole-Class Writing Studies vs. Individual Writing Studies
Every year I write on my syllabus that students will produce a new piece of work every four weeks. And while I do create units of study that typically span four weeks, students aren’t necessarily finishing a new piece every month. It often takes us longer than planned to move through a study. Holidays and […]
moving writers 