Mentor Text: The Poem Where I Lie About Everything by Rudy Francisco Techniques: Lying Making Your Audience Think Reflection Background – Let me start with a confession. December kicked my butt. We came into on the heels of report cards, and a heightened set of protocols in reaction to a second wave with record setting COVID […]
Where do we start when teaching reading outside of the ELA classroom? Abigail takes you through some of the moves you may take. It’s not as scary as it might seem.
Mentor Texts: ‘The Afternoon The World Health Organization Declared the Pandemic’ by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer Techniques: Using Poetry to Write About the Tough Stuff Background – One of my favourite things about poetry is how it can be used to put complicated feelings into words. The poetry of protest is powerful, as are poems that are […]
As is our habit, we are taking the summer away from the blog to read, write, and recharge. We’ll be back in late August with new content, but for the summer, let’s take a journey down memory lane as we visit our ten most-read posts from the previous school year! Mentor Text: The Truth From […]
My beat this year is all about exploring how students can write their way INto texts and use their writing (or others’) to learn more about literature. If you’re looking for new ways to use writing in a literature study or hoping to blend writing workshop into a course where it doesn’t seem like a […]
Mentor Text: My Honest Poem by Rudy Francisco Techniques: Writing About Oneself Writing Poetry Background: In a recent planning session, I mentioned that I lean on poetry pretty hard in Grade 10. My colleague Rachelle replied that I lean pretty hard on poetry in all my courses. I can’t help it. There’s something about the expression […]
Instead of giving you a specific account to follow with this edition of Teaching From My Twitter Feed, I thought we’d have some fun with one my favorite Twitter joys: The Rabbit Hole. There’s a Rabbit Hole for every topic you can imagine on Twitter, and probably for a few you can’t. There’s also lots […]
As English teachers, we often fancy ourselves not just teachers of reading and writing, but keepers of a sacred flame: Culture. For better and worse, we’ve hitched our wagon to both the humanities and the arts and made it our role to help make students both literate and “worldly”. It’s an interesting time to […]
Mentor Text: What Were Giraffes? by Amaan Hyder Techniques: Descriptive writing Social commentary Tone Poetic form Background: As I said last week, my Twitter feed has become a pretty important source of poetry for me. I follow poets, teachers and poetry journals, and they all dump lots of great poems onto my screen. (Sometimes it […]
Mentor Text: Possible Subtitles by Mari Andrew Techniques: Memoir Analyzing Rhetoric Explaining a quote Pre-writing Background: If you’re a member of the Moving Writers community, then the work of Mari Andrew is familiar. We’re all big fans, and have been using her work in our classrooms. We’re all probably buying her book this week too. There […]
