On a recent sunny October morning, I laced up my sneakers and set out on a run through golden tree-lined paths in a park close to my house. The run was at a mild pace, the air fresh, and I was daydreaming while running. I ended the run red-cheeked but not overly winded or strained. […]
We’re thrilled to introduce you to another new contributing writer, Kelly Tumy. Kelly is a consultant in Texas, former president of TCTELA, incoming editor of the journal English in Texas, and one of the people in this biz that I trust them most. You’ll adore her. You can find out more about Kelly here or […]
Most teachers have grand aspirations when embarking upon inquiry work with their classes, but when they get to the part where the kids actually have to find out stuff…it all comes crashing down. What if there was a game you could play with students to sharpen their Google searching skills, as well as their research […]
One of my biggest challenges as a teacher is getting students to feel connected to history. To them, especially at the middle school age, history might as well be the Milky Way– kids are told that it’s real and that they are a part of it, but the scope of history often has such galactical […]
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 […]
In his 1995 work, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, astrophysicist Carl Sagan wrote a sentence that would be uttered in classrooms around the world for decades to come: “there’s no such thing as a dumb question.” We’ll assume, of course, that Sagan is excluding the students in your class who […]
Welcome to Write Like a Historian! In this series, we’ll explore how to bring writing workshop into the social studies classroom. Every student is a historian. Let’s teach them how to write like one.
moving writers 