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 […]
There is so much ugliness in the world. Enough to last us all for a good long while. As I was adjusting my classes this week, I thought, why not beauty? My AP students have been fixated on the weird and wonderful language in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. And frankly, I’m not over it, have […]
Mentor Texts: All 115 of Taylor Swift’s Songs, Ranked by Rob Sheffield School Days and Parisian Nightsuits: Every ‘Freaks and Geeks’ Episode, Ranked by Jennifer Wood Writing Techniques: Criticism Considering Appropriate Length Recognizing good writing Background: One of this week’s mentor texts was a total must read for me based upon the subject material. […]
As any writing teacher knows, one of the hardest things about teaching writing is getting meaningful feedback to students. And in a writing workshop model where students are constantly writing, the task can be even more daunting. But as Kelly Gallagher has reminded us, our kids need to write much more than we can grade. […]
Hi, Beth! Thanks for asking. As you know, mentor texts can be incredibly powerful tools to help students see the beauty in our language—and studying mentor texts at the sentence level can help students see what happens when we gather the best words in the best order. I almost always use mentor texts to […]
Today is an important day, a day all teachers cherish. Graduation. How remarkable to be able to share in this milestone year after year, class after class. What a privilege to take some small part in the upbringing and education of so many wonderful young people moving up and onto the next steps of their […]
Today’s guest post is from Liz Matheny (@matheeli) I like to open and close the year with reflective, narrative writing. I do this for two reasons: to help my students explore themselves and their experiences, but also to help them see the growth in their writing. One of my favorite ways to do is to […]
I love showing Dead Poets Society to Grade 12 students. There’s something special about that movie and that group. They’re not much longer for my building, and will soon be sallying forth to “Carpe diem.” But, if I must be honest, I’ve always applied the Stink of English class to it by attaching an academic […]
I’ve written before about lessons inspired by my Twitter feed and it happened again early this week. Sometimes, right when you need it most, the universe drops the perfect mentor text right in your lap. My AP Language students are busy prepping for the exam and all of them need a little more work with […]
moving writers 