In this summer’s beat Abigail takes you through two strategies that you can discover in Liz Prather’s new book “The Confidence to Write”… two strategies to start the school year off right and a great starting place for teacher growth this summer.
Category: character
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 […]
Mentor Text Wednesday: The Graveyard Book
Mentor Text: excerpts from The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman Techniques: Descriptive Writing Background – I’ve shared pretty openly that there are a few parts of my practice as an English teacher that have made teaching during a pandemic easier. One of those things has been the fact that at our school, each of our courses […]
A Little Write Music
What does Stephen Sondheim have to do with writing instruction? The answer: Everything.
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 […]
The Enneagram Meets the ELA Classroom
Ever heard of the Enneagram? How could implementing personality types into ELA help your students better analyze characters and create authentic characters? I take you through some moves in this MW piece
The Stakes of the Story: Learning from Tommy Orange
When I was a drama student in high school, a theater teacher offered this important reminder as we choreographed stage blocking for a scene: “Every story has stakes.” These words were intended as a helpful cue to all the actors on the stage – to focus on conveying the risks involved as a character made […]
To Teach Writing Sin Miedo: Rethinking how we create fear or courage for our writers
ESSENTIAL QUESTION: How do we provide students with the opportunities and space to write “sin miedo”? ADDITIONAL QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION: What does it mean to write without fear? Where does fear come from in the context of writing in the classroom? What kinds of classroom traumas create or worsen this fear? How do we help […]
Two Ways to Bring Students’ Voices into the Writing Classroom
“Don’t forget to cast your ballot!” “Vote!” We just passed the most important time of this year: election day. According to the New York Times, this year’s election and candidates led to heavy, and record-breaking, voter turnout, and there were many measures in place to ensure ballots were counted in time. We’ve had crazy high […]
Poetry as An Act of Revision
One key idea threads through my series this year about poetry as part of the writing process for other genres: poetry sharpens our diction. Frequent practice in reading and writing poetry tunes our eyes and ears to what works and does not work in our choice of words, the same way practicing guitar helps train […]
moving writers 