In this school years last beat Abigail takes you through a writing strategy of “dream/vision boards” to cast a vision for the future with your students.
Category: writing with mentors
An Epic Mentor: Social Media
This month @mrsablund takes you through the mentor our students know best… social media. How can we use this in our classrooms as writers? Read to find out!
7 Ways to Get Students Writing about the War in Ukraine
Between this post and my last, a war began. And we shouldn’t be surprised. Like the rise of Nazi Germany after WWI, the conflict in Ukraine has been building for more than twenty years. Putin and his post-Soviet ancestors have been playing a game of Hungry Hippos with the Ukraine and former Soviet satellite states […]
28 Mini-Mentors for Prompt-Based Writing
Catch up on my series this fall. Last month I shared mini-mentors for review writing! Sadly, some students only write in response to prompts in English class. Whether it’s daily journaling prompts or larger essay prompts, these students miss out on one of the toughest parts of an authentic writing practice: developing ideas. Still, both […]
Playlist of Your Life
Playlists are constantly playing in my classroom and house. But what are the playlist of our lives? In this piece Abigail takes you through the moves of using writing playlists to create meaningful narratives.
The Enneagram Meets the ELA Classroom
Ever heard of the Enneagram? How could implementing personality types into ELA help your students better analyze characters and create authentic characters? I take you through some moves in this MW piece
You’re a Poet.. Didn’t You Know It?
Have you heard of the Important Book? Margaret Wise takes us through a mentor text that will help your students engage in a rich vocabulary centered writing lesson and ask themselves.. what is the most important thing? [Perfect lesson to take writing out of the ELA classroom and into math]
Guided by (too many) Voices
It’s funny how a few things in school remain mostly normal despite everything else feeling so strange this year. Like the annual arrival of National Honors Society nominations– it was a nice reminder of “normal” when a student in my Zoom last week asked if we could set up a breakout room so he could […]
Tools Over Rules: Writing as Choice-Making, not Compliance
In fact, students often think of writing as an act of compliance – follow the teacher’s instruction, receive a passing grade.
A 3D Model for Voice
One of my favorite things about being part of a community of English teachers both in my building and online (Hi Teacher Twitter Buddies!) is that every once in a while this really fun thing happens where a piece of writing gets published somewhere with really powerful voice or a really fun structure and all […]
moving writers 