My last post mentioned Pippin, and now I’m quoting Rodgers & Hammerstein; I had musical theater on my mind this summer because I knew my break would end with a “bucket list” vacation to Broadway, the four-plays-in-four-days kind of trip my Tony Awards-watching teenage self had always dreamed about. The trip was an absolute treat, […]
I coached and taught debate for almost ten years and, in the process, became a bit of a news junkie. So naturally, the political conventions were on 24/7 at my house this summer. And, naturally, like every other English teacher in the world who was tuned into politics this summer, I followed the Melania Trump […]
Mentor Texts: Various letters from McSweeney’s “Best Of”& website (The archive of letters on the website is huge.) Background As you may have noticed, the folks that contribute to this site have been putting together ideas dedicated to kicking the year off in your classroom. I had to decide whether I would share something related […]
One of the writing teacher’s lesser-known jobs is to calm the writing fears of our gifted and talented students.
A challenging, fun, and engaging activity using Hamilton as a mentor text for character and theme analysis.
Dear readers, We love you. We really do! We love imagining you reading the blog from your classrooms across the country. We love reading your comments & hearing about the new strategies you have tried. We love seeing your tweets. We love meeting you in real life, strangers who aren’t really strangers because they feel like […]
Today we bring you another amazing guest post from Jeremy Hyler, a middle school language arts teacher and co-director of the Chippewa River Writing Project. He is the coauthor of Create, Compose, Connect: Reading, Writing, and Learning with Digital Tools with Troy Hicks. There is no arguing that the landscape of teaching students how to write has […]
Today’s guest post is from Kelly Pace, Hanover County’s (Virginia) Teacher of the Year! She teaches 9th, 11th, and 12th grade English along with IB Theory of Knowledge. You might remember her from a post she wrote for us earlier in the year on teaching active & passive voice! Nineteen years ago, I found myself […]
This week, we bring you a special treat — a three-part series from two new guest writers. Over the next few days, they will tell the story of their cross-school, cross-grade writing collaboration as they connected 9th and 12th grade writers. As you’ll see, this partnership grew beyond their expectations! Christopher Bronke is the English […]
Mentor Texts: How Batman Made Me Fall In Love With Comic Books by Neil Gaiman Superman and Me by Sherman Alexie Writing Techniques: Writing About Literature Memoir Background: It’s the last week of school. Report cards and marks were submitted this morning. I have a couple of days to return my classroom to something I […]
moving writers 