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!
Category: Writing Workshop
A Conversation that Nudges Students out of Embarrassment
If you’ve ever taught a bunch of self-conscious middle schoolers, you know that adolescents are perpetually embarrassed about anything and everything. You also know that they don’t just “get over it” when they realize that embarrassment is an impediment to their learning. In that state of biological and emotional upheaval, the rational voice (even when it exists) is drowned in the fear of embarrassment.
First Year Writing Teacher Support: Your Moves Are Not Their Moves
As writing teachers, we’ve done our fair share of writing ourselves. We each have our own unique process, a set of strategies we’ve grown comfortable with from practice. If you’re new to teaching writing, that probably means you did a lot of writing recently in college. Your process is finely tuned; you’re likely a well-oiled […]
Podcasts: A New Way of Writing
A Brief Podcasting Primer If you don’t already know what a podcast is, it’s basically a radio show that people can stream or download to their own devices. It’s like listening to radio a la carte in that you can pick and choose what episodes you want to listen to–and you have the power to […]
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 […]
The Fiction-Fix for Bad Endings: Incident-Irony
I thought, There must be a key to good endings. It must be a skill – a teachable, practice-able skill.
The answer: Irony.
Writing Flash Fiction: Environmental Ghost Stories
In last month’s post, I described how writing flash stories helped my students process the contents of an informational text. As we turned to a news article about a disturbed landscape, I wondered: How could recasting the details of a news article in the form of a flash ghost story help students understand its implications? […]
5 Ways to Use Mini Moves for Writers: Flipped Classroom
Welcome to the official Mini Moves for Writers launch week! We’re so excited to share this new project with you — one we hope will help you, make your teaching life easier, and move the writers in your classroom. Each day this week we will be sharing a new idea for how to use these […]
Mini-Mentors for Literary Analysis(+ a Sneak Peek at a BIG New Project!)
Catch up on the whole mini-mentors series! Mini-Mentors for Review Writing, Prompt-Based Writing, and Revision! In the previous iterations of this series, I’ve suggested some ways you might use these mini-mentors in your own classroom: as sentence study warm-ups, as whole-class lessons, in small-group and individual writing conferences. But, you’ll notice something different and special […]
16 Ways of Making Asking Easier (Part 2 of 2)
Someone recently asked me if my posts on Moving Writers this year are sponsored by Newkirk’s publishers.
moving writers 