I’ve been thinking about hope lately. It’s winter here in New York City. There are certain things about the season here that feel hopeful: the smell of Christmas trees on some street corners where lots have popped up, the twinkle of lights along the railings of brownstones, and even some of the neighborhood dogs have […]
Do students in your school write a personal essay of some kind every single year? They do in the three schools I’ve taught in. In fact, narrative writing — especially nonfiction, personal narratives — are perhaps the most ubiquitous piece of writing taught in every school I’ve ever visited. How can we differentiate that — […]
When students do not think through the point of entry into their story, they pick the first thing that occurs to them, and this almost always means that the memoir gets narrated chronologically; any potential for flashbacks or other transitions in time is unexplored.
Ever since NASA began releasing images captured by the James Webb Space Telescope, I’ve become reacquainted with my child self’s way of thinking about space–how every Milky Way diorama, every glow in the dark star sticker affixed to the ceiling, every classroom poster of those dusty, celestial bodies evoked deep wonder. Part of the joy […]
My point is this: using your knowledge to create something new in writing not only helps learning stick – it can inspire more learning.
Photo by Zac Ong on Unsplash During the last couple of years of teaching, making mini-zines has been a highlight. An 8-page zine has been a go-to method for helping students shrink a narrative down to accessible compactness. As my students plot environmental stories culminating in a call to action, the details associated with specific […]
Speaking as a teacher of 30 years experience who has, for all of those 30 years, asked students to write about their lives, I can only say I have never had a student complain about writing about their lives after the fact.
…In our classrooms, we can read for meaning, discuss meaning, and allow students to write things that mean something to them.
In last month’s post, I described how writing flash stories helped my students process the contents of an informational text. As we turned to a news article about a disturbed landscape, I wondered: How could recasting the details of a news article in the form of a flash ghost story help students understand its implications? […]
The phrase, “a message in a bottle,” conjures an image of a weather-beaten bottle, bearing a message from an earnest sender. It came to mind as I prepared to share a National Geographic encyclopedic entry about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch with my students. Eager to provide them with more opportunities to process the implications […]
moving writers 