Learning how to help my AP Researchers…by becoming one
Category: research
Turn Local History into Advocacy with Three Different Writing Projects
One of my biggest challenges as a teacher is getting students to feel connected to history. To them, especially at the middle school age, history might as well be the Milky Way– kids are told that it’s real and that they are a part of it, but the scope of history often has such galactical […]
Podcasts: A New Way of Writing
A Brief Podcasting Primer If you don’t already know what a podcast is, it’s basically a radio show that people can stream or download to their own devices. It’s like listening to radio a la carte in that you can pick and choose what episodes you want to listen to–and you have the power to […]
No Dumb Questions: Using Inquiry to Drive Research
In his 1995 work, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, astrophysicist Carl Sagan wrote a sentence that would be uttered in classrooms around the world for decades to come: “there’s no such thing as a dumb question.” We’ll assume, of course, that Sagan is excluding the students in your class who […]
Writing a Climate Victory Garden
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 […]
Inquiry Lab: Anchor Charts that Help Students Go Further
Welcome back to the Inquiry Lab! In my last post, I shared ways I teach and coach students to nudge each other toward deeper learning. Today, we’ll get into ways the teacher can leverage a workshop approach to similar effect, especially when it comes to inquiry work. It all begins with effective anchor charts. To […]
Inquiry Lab: Teaching Students to Nudge Each Other Toward Deep Learning
Welcome to the Inquiry Lab! In this series, we’re thinking through how we can use the workshop model to teach inquiry work, in any subject (writing included, of course). For the last year or so, I’ve been rethinking the way we teach into group work and partner collaborations. To that end, here at Moving Writer’s, […]
Environmental Justice, Comic Book Storytelling, and Seed Work
In Charlie La Greca and Rebecca Bratspies’ environmental justice comic, Mayah’s Lot, the image of the aspen seed is prominent. The titular character intends to plant an aspen seed in a garden she secretly tends on a vacant lot, just before finding out a corporation’s plan to transform the lot into an industrial toxic storage waste facility. […]
How Do We Research? Two Ways I’m Hitting the Reset Button
Last year turned everything I thought I knew about teaching and learning upside down, and I don’t want to rush back to old practices. To avoid that, my blog focus this semester is on places where I want to hit the reset button. In September I reset by reading Writing Rhetorically and figuring out how […]
Deep Dives and Side Quests: Idea Gold Mines
As an American now living and teaching in Canada, I’ve had to learn a lot in a short period of time. I’m teaching a self-contained 3rd + 4th grade class this year, which means I’m teaching Social Studies, and the American Education system doesn’t really give us all that much about our neighbors to the […]
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