Mentor Text Wednesday: The Empty Sentiment of The Last of Us

Mentor Text: The Empty Sentiment of The Last of Us by Jackson McHenry Techniques: Background – As a insomniac geek teacher who loves stories in pretty much any form, the combination of streaming services and the internet is a gift. There’s lots of stories to immerse myself in, and there’s lots of commentary on those stories. […]

Picture Book-Driven Inquiry: Picturing Survival with Octavia Butler

I’ve been eager to shake up my classroom literature circles.  Sometimes, it is easy to fall into a routine rut: assign some chapters to be read, passages to be annotated, literary techniques to be identified.  As we read Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, I thought about what it meant for Lauren Olamina to come […]

Bios, Threads, & Retweets: Moving Writers with Twitter Simulations

We know that writing strategies are everywhere. And, I am amazed at the amount of writing skills and strategies that are embedded into social media platforms. Although the student writer may not actually notice the author’s craft and intention that goes into well-crafted tweets, they are there in abundance, and I realized recently that these […]

Bridging Gaps Through the Power of Writing Through the Eyes of the Student

I have had a lot of conversations this year with teachers about expectations for students, specifically 9th grade and high school students, and it is clear that not everyone agrees on what the expectations should be for writers at the secondary level. Which, honestly is ironic considering the amount of standards and standardized assessments that […]