A tough start to the school year combined with the launch of a new unit created the perfect storm to force me to put into writing 3 beliefs that drive me as an educator.
Category: Notebook Time
Tiny Writing: Boosting Opportunities for Frequent Student Publication
I love swimming in writing studies for weeks at a time with my students — immersing ourselves in mentor texts, gathering information, writing off the page, talking out our ideas, drafting, revising. But when the average writing study lasts 3-5 weeks, it’s hard to keep the momentum and excitement of seeing a piece through to […]
The Syntax of Things: Lesson Ideas for Syntax Study
Mentor Texts: First few paragraphs of “The Tell Tale Heart” by Edgar Allen Poe Various photographs of your choice “After I Was Thrown Into the River and Before I Drown” by Dave Eggers Big Idea: Writers use syntax purposefully to create meaning and a desired effect. What’s ahead in this post: A 3-day lesson series […]
The Fearless Writers
This fall, I’m teaching two classes. One starts with fiction and narrative writing, and the other launches with informational and persuasive texts. I committed to teaching each with a mentor text approach to analyzing our reading and crafting our own choice text. Within the first weeks, our narrative work was on a roll, but our […]
3 Tips for Using Literature as Mentor Texts
Teaching is often a balancing act. We’re constantly balancing, sometimes battling, the seemingly opposing forces of lesson planning vs. grading, eating the cake in the workroom vs. not eating the cake in the workroom, literature study vs. writing study. But why can’t we have our cake and eat it, too? And by cake, I mean writing. […]
Voice Lessons: Helping Students Find Their Writerly Voices
Lessons to help students explore their unique and original voices in writing.
Never a Day Without a Line… or a Word
“Never a day without a line,” Brenda repeated. In the summer of 2011, I had the pleasure of participating in the PA Writing and Literature Project Summer Invitational Writing Institute. Although I’d been teaching for several years by then, my experience with the writing project that summer was the first time I started to think […]
“Getting to Know You”: Introductions Inspired by Broadway
My last post mentioned Pippin, and now I’m quoting Rodgers & Hammerstein; I had musical theater on my mind this summer because I knew my break would end with a “bucket list” vacation to Broadway, the four-plays-in-four-days kind of trip my Tony Awards-watching teenage self had always dreamed about. The trip was an absolute treat, […]
Mentor Text Wednesday: Explaining the Contents
Mentor Text: An Open Letter to the Person Who Stole My iPod: Please Let Me Explain My Music Collection by Dan Ozzi (Be aware, contains some cussin’!) Writing Techniques: Reflective Writing Humour Writing about music Background: In Canada, this past weekend was a long weekend. I did my best to shut off the TeacherBrain and […]
“The Right Words at the Right Time”: Commencement Speeches and Essays for End-of-the-Year Reflection
It is six o’clock on a Saturday night, and I am sitting at my desk in my classroom. The end of the semester is definitely near! While many of you might still have weeks of instruction left on the calendar, I am down to my last week before finals and commencement. My desk is a […]
moving writers 