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, […]
It’s the most wonderful time of the year! Time to gather (in Houston) to learn together! Here’s where you can find members of the Moving Writers team at #NCTE18. We hope you’ll come say hi!!!
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 […]
During the school year, Time is one of our biggest hurdles. There is never enough time to do all the things. Summer is a fantasy with its long, light, unencumbered days spread out before us. We plan road trips and brewery crawls and projects and beach days and fill our calendar with all the things […]
We are joining our friends at Heinemann to present a 3-part webinar series designed to get you ready to help your students move beyond literary analysis! You can read session descriptions and register here. Here’s an overview: We are getting ready to go BIG—to a place in students’ writing beyond five-paragraph analyses of themes and […]
We are dying to know what you think of Beyond Literary Analysis! So, we’re running a contest! Post a review of our new book on GoodReads or Amazon between today and Friday, April 6, and your name will be entered into a drawing for a 30-minute Google Hangout Q&A for you, or you and a buddy, […]
