Bring sketching into your workshop to help students visualize details and reflect on the writing process.
Category: Notebook Time
Finding Writing Time Where Time Doesn’t Exist
With a little bit of creativity and flexibility, you can add more writing time to your classes!
Watch Us on #theEdCollabGathering!
What a thrill it was to go LIVE this morning with #theEdCollabGathering to chat about Notebook Time and the ways it moves our student writers forward through play and discovery! You can view our session here, on The Educator Collaborative’s Gathering site, or here on YouTube! You can get all of our materials by […]
#TheEdCollabGathering: Unearthing Discovery & Play
Did you know that on April 2, Chris Lehman and the generous geniuses at The Educator Collaborative are giving away a whole day of brilliant, free PD that you can watch from home in your jammies? We would love to have you join Allison and me from 11-12pm as we talk about bringing play back to the […]
Sentence Study to Textual Analysis — an Aha! moment
In 2014, I attended Alison and Rebekah’s presentation at NCTE in Washington, DC, and left buzzing about so much of what they shared, especially sentence studies. For reluctant writers like my freshmen, a sentence study is a great way to ease into creative writing or new sentence styles. The thought of writing a paragraph sometimes […]
Making Time for Vocabulary Instruction that Matters
Years and years ago, before I had been bitten by the writing workshop bug, I became obsessed with vocabulary instruction. My school used a series of vocabulary workbooks at each grade level, and I had witnessed how that approach didn’t worked. Not for real. Not for the long term. Some students would dutifully memorize the […]
What Happens at NCTE Doesn’t Stay at NCTE
This weekend Rebekah and I travelled to Minneapolis for the NCTE Annual Convention. For the past 96 hours we have been immersed in the world of language arts, and while we’re exhausted and our backpacks are overstuffed, our brains and hearts are full and we just can’t shut up about NCTE. We can’t stop processing […]
Finding Time for Technology in Writing Workshop
I think my students would tell you that our classroom is a happy, productive place. They would also tell you that it’s predictable. Monday through Thursday, we write during notebook time, read mentor texts and take notes during the lesson, and write and confer during workshop. We do this for 46 minutes four times a […]
Notebook Time: What It Is & Why We Do It
Rebekah and I often often tweet ideas for notebook time, and recently many of you have been asking us to explain it and show how it fits into the workshop. Put simply, notebook time is an opportunity for students to play in their notebooks with different ideas, information, and genres. In our classrooms, notebook time […]
moving writers 