Google Games: 3 Quick Tips for Helping Kids Level Up Their (Re)search

Most teachers have grand aspirations when embarking upon inquiry work with their classes, but when they get to the part where the kids actually have to find out stuff…it all comes crashing down. What if there was a game you could play with students to sharpen their Google searching skills, as well as their research […]

Making All Things New: Prompts for Thinking Creatively

This year on Moving Writers, I am dusting off some old-but-wise books on my shelf about writing, creating a tiny review, then considering how one passage from the book can inform writing instruction today, even decades after the book was first published.  This month, I’ll consider Metro: Journeys in Writing Creatively by Hans Ostrom, Wendy […]

Helping Students Weigh Environmental Solutions with Podcasts

Photo by Ian Taylor on Unsplash My students love debating, but the conversations often stall when it comes to addressing environmental solutions.  The discomfort experienced in this moment can be attributed to missing opportunities for discussing and practicing climate stewardship.  Navigating unfamiliar language associated with environmental problem-solving can reinforce the sense that weighing environmental solutions […]

Where Dystopian Fiction Meets Water Journalism

One way to help students become climate stewards is to model how reading paired climate texts enhances our ability to both problem-spot and problem-solve.  In our haste to offer solutions, we may insufficiently consider the root causes of environmental problems.  While reading Neal and Jarrod Shusterman’s novel Dry, my students and I pore over local […]

A Conversation that Nudges Students out of Embarrassment

If you’ve ever taught a bunch of self-conscious middle schoolers, you know that adolescents are perpetually embarrassed about anything and everything. You also know that they don’t just “get over it” when they realize that embarrassment is an impediment to their learning. In that state of biological and emotional upheaval, the rational voice (even when it exists) is drowned in the fear of embarrassment. 

Picture Book-Driven Inquiry: Picturing Survival with Octavia Butler

I’ve been eager to shake up my classroom literature circles.  Sometimes, it is easy to fall into a routine rut: assign some chapters to be read, passages to be annotated, literary techniques to be identified.  As we read Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, I thought about what it meant for Lauren Olamina to come […]