If you’ve read any of my articles before or know me as a teacher, you know I try to provide authentic, real-world experiences in my classroom whenever I can. I love when I have the opportunity to make some cross-curricular connections between ELA and other content areas, especially if the topic is applicable to life […]
Author: Paige Timmerman
Getting Sneaky With Research: Zines as an Essay Alternative
When we think of research writing, we often think of the laborious, quarter-long essay projects that often scare our students. And while there is value in teaching our students to use research that culminates in an academic essay, the truth is that not all research writing looks that way. My students have been doing infographics […]
Making Mini Lessons Engaging: A Barbenheimer Themed Writing Contest
This year, I’ve been making a point to try new and engaging ways to offer mini lessons to my students. In my last post, I discussed how I used samples from my students’ warm-up writing project to help students elevate their sentences. My next creative idea came during homecoming week on “Barbenheimer Day,” where students […]
Making Mini Lessons Engaging: A Barbenheimer Themed Challenge
This year, I’ve been making a point to try new and engaging ways to offer mini lessons to my students. In my last post, I discussed how I used samples from my students’ warm-up writing project to help students elevate their sentences. My next creative idea came during homecoming week on “Barbenheimer Day,” where students […]
Instant Mini Lessons: Using Student Writing Samples in Revision
Don’t you love it when, as a teacher, you can make yourself obsolete? That’s exactly what I intended to do in my first writing project of the year. In conjunction with The New York Times Coming of Age in 2023 contest, I wanted my students to write a scene about their lives where the reader […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
First Year Writing Teacher Support: Use Your Resources
As a first year teacher, I was so excited to teach writing. When I sat down to plan my year the summer before it started, I had so many writing units planned. I wanted my students to write paper after paper, knowing they needed the practice but also hoping they would begin to view writing […]
First Year Teacher Support: Telling Yourself, “It’ll Buff”
There’s a saying a lot of students at my school use. If something unfortunate happens that they want to shake off— they’re having a bad day, they drop their iPad on the floor, they accidentally bump into someone on the way into class— you might hear them say it. When I first heard the expression, […]
moving writers 