Remember how Olaf, the snowman from Frozen, sings about how excited he is to experience summer after Arendelle’s deep freeze? Consider me his opposite. As summer (and summer writing!) approaches, I, ever the Wisconsin girl at heart, am thinking about snow. Seriously. I’m thinking specifically about a snowman-size snowball, the kind you make by rolling […]
You guys: it’s all happening! On Wednesday, we will release our first 100 Days of Summer Writing — a slide deck of 100 slides to inspire writing over the summer, instructions for how to participate yourself, and instructions for how to get your students involved. Over the next two weeks, the writers here at Moving […]
It’s that time of year. Yeah, we may sometimes feel like we’re in survival mode with eager tallies marking how many Mondays are left in the school year, but as much as we might be counting down, we’re also starting to plan ahead for next year. We’re waxing reflective and submitting school supply lists to […]
Summer reading is part of the school norm — we want ensure students’ engagement over the summer, we want to prevent “summer slide” in literacy. And yet, we tend to ignore writing slide. The Moving Writers staff have been asking: What happens to our writers over the summer? So we are gearing up to share a […]
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 […]
In January, during Moving Writers’ series on testing, I wrote about structuring a class when there’s that external test to consider. I really like having a structure. It’s nice to have touchstones and routines to ground things so you can go and explore the things that come up as you go. I’m currently teaching a […]
The remix of our Memoir Study focused initially on the reading of memoir. Writing needed a touchup too. Last April, long after we were finished the semester we taught our Grade 12s, the students who studied memoir, in, my colleague Ashley and I were driving to the city to see Penny Kittle. An hour in […]
Writing alongside our students is one of the most important instructional moves we can make – both for our students and for ourselves.
EACH MONTH ON MOVING WRITERS, I try to share something writing-related happening in my classroom that might be interesting or helpful to fellow teachers. As I sat down to write this month’s post, however, news of the Parkland school shooting was just breaking—how 17 individuals died today in yet another mass school shooting. Suddenly the […]
