I thought I was so clever. I thought I had saved myself some time. Survey says…I was wrong!
Category: Uncategorized
A Tour of Mentor Texts for Middle Grade and High School Boys
On weekly visits to the library with my two-year-old son I often find myself browsing the periodicals in the children’s section. From there I can spy my busy toddler as he moves from the play kitchen to the dinosaur section to the puppet show. Recently I found myself drawn to magazines geared for boys and […]
Why This/Not That? A thinking routine to move kids from identification to analysis
One of the biggest challenges in teaching rhetorical analysis is teaching kids to move beyond identification to actual analysis. I have found over the years that when I teach kids to look for certain things, they find them!! If we talk about repetition, they can track it down. If we talk about parallel structure, boom. […]
A Lesson on Beautiful Sentences
There is so much ugliness in the world. Enough to last us all for a good long while. As I was adjusting my classes this week, I thought, why not beauty? My AP students have been fixated on the weird and wonderful language in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. And frankly, I’m not over it, have […]
The Golden Writing Workshop: Yay or Nay?
No matter who you ask, most writing teachers will say that what they need more of in their workshops is exactly what they need more of in life: Just. More. Time. I personally spend a lot of time thinking about how to find writing time where time doesn’t exist, how to add minutes back into […]
Teaching From My Twitter Feed: Golf on Fire
Last week I started the year with my AP Seminar students talking about perspectives: our own, those of others, and the ones forgotten or ignored in texts. Much of the success of their research will be dependent on their ability to see issues from multiple perspectives. Imagine my excitement then, when this popped up in […]
Mentor Text Wednesday: Studying Structure & Genre Mixing with Nicola Yoon
Today’s Mentor Text Wednesday post comes from Amy Estersohn, a middle school English teacher in New York. She blogs over at teachingtransition.wordpress.com and tweets @HMX_MSE. Mentor Text: “We don’t make princesses in those colours” by Nicola Yoon in The Guardian Writing Techniques: Structure Craft Genre mixing Background: The Guardian is one of my favorite online magazines for […]
Organizing to Communicate: Open the Door of Your Writing Workshop to School Families
I’ve just moved to a new city, and with a move comes lots of conversations with strangers, small talk with new people who I hope against hope might become new friends. Inevitably, that small talk turns to work, and when I tell those potential new friends that I teach high school, inevitably someone in the […]
How to Make Blogging a Core Practice in Your Writing Workshop
A few months after Rebekah and I started Moving Writers in 2015, I knew blogging was something I needed to bring into my classroom. I was undoubtedly behind the curve — lots of teachers I knew were already blogging with students, and every year at NCTE, I circled multiple blogging sessions in my program but […]
Using Tech to Steal Back Time for Workshop
A few years ago, the writing in my classroom was floundering. Our department had been aligning curriculum for awhile and, in my rush to get my ducks in a row and “cover” everything, I had begun sacrificing key parts of my instruction. There just wasn’t time to fit it all in. One afternoon during a […]
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