An addition to a lesson that will create confident writers.
Category: Uncategorized
Yes/No/So
I try to avoid teaching students formulas for their writing, but sometimes giving them a go-to formula for thinking can help them organize their writing independently.
The Door of Chaos: Responding to Original Ideas
The Door of Chaos allows students to respond to and collaborate with their peers in other classes throughout the day.
Bringing Life to Literary Analysis
This post explores an alternative approach to literary analysis that might make your students feel more engaged with the writing genre.
Wonderfully Messy Notebooks
I had great plans to help my students organize their writing lives. Things didn’t go quite as planned, but their writing lives are alive and well!
4 Ideas: Using Mentor Texts for Literary Analysis
Using mentors to teach literary analysis makes sense. Beginning in elementary school, students are engaged in some form of literary analysis. In fact, my second grade daughter, works out her analytical muscles on the regular. Her (amazing) teacher provides her students with plenty of scaffolding and sentence starters. She coaches them with exercises like I […]
No Unicorns Here: Demystifying the Hard Work of Reading with Mentor Texts
How adopting a mentor text approach to writing instruction is actually helping me teach reading comprehension
From Facepalm to Firestarter: Embarrassment and Inspiration at a Writing Project Symposium
Facepalm. By the second panel of the 2017 Greater Madison Writing Project symposium, “From High School to College: Engaging in Writing Dialogue,” you could have made a meme of me (or at least my inner monologue, since I managed to keep my outer composure), sitting like Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Captain Picard with my head […]
Research Lessons From My Twitter Feed
I’ve been scrolling through Twitter a lot these past two weeks. I can’t look away from the news and everything I read is prompting new questions and new things I need to research. Saturday, someone tweeted a poem by Naomi Shihab-Nye, Gate A-4. It’s a beautiful story of an interaction between two women in an […]
An Alternative Assignment and What I Learned
When an attempt at motivating a student goes wrong, professional positivity is a must.
moving writers 