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 […]
An exploration of how Twitter can provide quick mini-lessons on writing structure.
As the daffodils start sprouting near sidewalks and the draft in my apartment warms to where I don’t feel compelled to don a housecoat at all hours and become more of a Rose Nylund than I already am, the longer, sunshiny, pollen-y days give me the itch to experiment. In the last two weeks, my […]
We’ve been studying up on the idea of journalistic “angles”, in preparation for the writing of our big narrative journalism piece. It’s an unfortunate and important time to be examining such things with high school students. Where we’d normally examining several models about random topics and attempt to uncover the underlying purpose or persuasive efforts […]
Mentor Text: My Three Solaces by Erin Fornoff Writing Techniques: Poetry Brevity Memoir Background: As this post publishes, many of you are headed back into your classrooms after a break for the holidays. (Monday for me!) It’s a new calendar year. This, combined with the holiday season, makes me reflective. The chaos of school before […]
Lately my son’s favorite activity has been our daily Halloween Walk in which we start at the top of our block and stroll from house to house snapping pictures of all the Halloween decorations we see with his Fisher Price camera. Today we saw spiders and pumpkins and ghosts and skeletons and scarecrows and orange […]
