Louise Maher-Johnson’s poem, “Notes from a Climate Victory Garden,” offers a series of calls to action, as seen in the poem’s opening: Rebalance: Greenhouse Gases (CO2,N2O, CH4, H2O vapor) with photosynthesis. Recognize: Plants cool by evaporation, ground cover, shade, and precipitation Replant: Lawns with Victory Gardens, as in world war past. Organized by lines beginning […]
Teaching students to hear the music in words, we can help them create writing that is not just efficient, accurate, and clear, but also playful, dramatic, and arresting.
This year on Moving Writers, my “beat” returns to poetry as a foundational element of a writing classroom. Each month’s post will examine how we can learn about an aspect of writing from a specific poem or poems, then look at what it might sound like to extend those ideas to a writing lesson in […]
I often find myself telling students, particularly my seniors, that I am “throwing them into the deep end.” As the year begins, I may assign a task that’s beyond their skill or comfort to see how they perform. If things go awry, I try to figure out where the gaps are and fill them. As […]
The brevity of poems allows us to slip them into lessons as we develop skills for writing in any genre.
One of the most rewarding aspects of my Moving Writers beat is hearing from other educators about how they encourage students to identify when they feel they are a part of Nature and not merely apart from it. Despite receiving a constant barrage of information, or perhaps because of it, our information-glutted minds seem to […]
I have bent under the weight
of it all and
I am yet
unbroken.
We know that writing strategies are everywhere. And, I am amazed at the amount of writing skills and strategies that are embedded into social media platforms. Although the student writer may not actually notice the author’s craft and intention that goes into well-crafted tweets, they are there in abundance, and I realized recently that these […]
Mentor Text: Song of My Speech Impediment by Dawn Macdonald Techniques: Multimedia Text Exploring Metaphor Background -It’s the last week of poetry month for 2021. Like many of us, I read a fair amount of poetry. I subscribe to two different daily poem a day newsletters, so I often wind up reading a poem first […]
Teaching writing, at first, was a struggle for me. It was a struggle because the kids seemed to detest it. When I asked them why I received all sorts of answers, but one answer that kept coming up was that they didn’t feel like the writing was “real”; they turned in all their writing to […]
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