I tell them that just as a good standup comedian can read out of the phone book and make it funny, a good writer can take a dull topic and make it interesting.
Category: Lesson for Tomorrow
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
Mentor Text Wednesday: The Poem Where I Lie About Everything
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 […]
Reading in Math? A Tale from Someone Who Survived It
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 Text Wednesday: Writing in Strange Times
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 […]
Moving Writers’ Top Ten: Mentor Text Wednesday — The Truth From The Cave
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 […]
Writing Our Way In…to a Quick Lesson for Tomorrow!
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 Wednesday: My Honest Poem
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 […]
TFMTF: Learning Through the Rabbit Hole
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 […]
Making Student Voice “Pop”
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 […]
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