It speaks volumes that three of our top ten posts in the 2016-17 school year explore the issue of abandoning the 5-paragraph essay in favor of structures that are more organic and authentic and favorable to our young writers. We have Tricia to thank for sharing all of her thinking around this issue. In today’s […]
Category: tricia ebarvia
Ask Moving Writers: Mentor Sentence Mini-lessons
Hi, Beth! Thanks for asking. As you know, mentor texts can be incredibly powerful tools to help students see the beauty in our language—and studying mentor texts at the sentence level can help students see what happens when we gather the best words in the best order. I almost always use mentor texts to […]
In Pursuit of Meaningful Feedback
Hi, Elizabeth! First, thank you for asking this important question! We know how important it is to find ways to give meaningful and timely feedback to students. But we also know how limited our time is—there are only so many minutes in a day, in a class, during prep periods, after school, before school. Finding […]
Best of the 2016-2017 School Year: Writing in the Wild: Beyond the 5-Paragraph Essay
I love this exploratory, confessional, honest narrative in which Tricia invites us along on her journey to her discovery, along with her students, that five paragraph essays were not only not serving them as writers, but were actually limiting and caging them. Tricia shares resources for thinking beyond five paragraphs, but more importantly, she opens […]
Best of the 2016-2017 School Year: 3 Favorite Writer’s Notebook Prompts
Last year, Rebekah and I committed to opening our classes with “notebook time” — ten minutes at the beginning of every class period for our students to write and think and sketch in their notebooks. Best decision ever! But let’s be honest, sometimes we’re still searching for the perfect writing invitation seconds before our students […]
Best of 2016-2017 School Year: “Teachable Alternatives” to the 5-Paragraph Essay
It’s no secret that the five paragraph essay is dead. But what goes in its place? In this post, Tricia examines several ways of moving beyond the contrived essay formulas of the past and into new writing territory that ultimately lets our students write what matters and find the forms that best showcases their ideas. […]
4 Ways of Looking at a Mentor Text: Incidental Comics
The school year is winding down—and I find myself thinking more and more of warm poolside days—yet everywhere I turn, rich mentor texts seem to come my way. I’ll find something and think, “Oh, that would have been perfect to use with ____” or “That would have worked great with ____!” Although it may be […]
Argument in the Wild: Reading & Writing from Media-Rich Texts
The idea that “everything’s an argument” seems almost too obvious these days. After all, talk to almost any adolescent today and it’s clear how aware they are of the ways in which they are constantly being persuaded, whether it’s an editorial from the Wall Street Journal or The New York Times, the latest newscast from […]
3 Favorite Writer’s Notebook Prompts
I have a confession. I didn’t always use a writer’s notebook, either as teacher and especially as a student. It’s hard to remember what that was like—Where did I keep all my thoughts? How did I keep track of it all? Writer’s notebooks—or journals—were something I remember learning about in graduate school, and while I […]
To Blog or Not to Blog: Blog!
As Moving Writers readers know, one of the central ideas behind this site is authentic writing—what does writing in the real and wild world look like (versus the sometimes too-tightly controlled world of our classrooms)? Over the years, I’ve come to believe that the more the writing I ask students to do in the classroom […]
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