Over my years teaching in a writing workshop, I have developed scads of forms and charts in an attempt to track my conversations with students during reading and writing conferences. Binders. Whole-class charts. Individual student charts. You name it, I have spent hours in Excel creating it. And, every year, by the spring, I have […]
Recently …
Top Ten of ’13-’14: #7
Mentor Text: “Better With Age” by Chris B. Brown. Grantland.com. 30 January 2014. Writing Technique: Supporting an argument with evidence Background: Truth be told, I am not a sporty girl. Athletic metaphors in the writing classroom do not come naturally to me. Thus, whenever I see one of my favorite cultural institutions write about sports, I jump […]
Top Ten of ’13-’14: #8
A Lesson For Tomorrow: Sentence Study Last week Rebekah blogged about teaching students how to find and use mentor textsto increase their independence and cure their writing blues. She posted a fantastic chart that uses a problem-solution or if-then approach to guiding students to and through mentor texts. As her chart indicates, sometimes a mentor text is just […]
Top Ten of ’13-’14: #9
An Introduction to Mentor Text Wednesday Welcome to our very first Mentor Text Wednesday! Mentor texts are powerful in the hands of writers – they engage our students, they motivate our students, they guide our students, they inspire our students. We know they work. But finding mentor texts is a time-consuming task for teachers. I […]
Top Ten of 2013-2014: #10 (with bonus material!)
Allison and I are taking some time away from the blog this summer to work on other writing projects. We will be popping in and out periodically to share resources and new ideas as we plan for the 2014-2015 school year. In the meantime, each Monday for the next ten weeks we will share our […]
The Liebster Award
Thank you Dorothy of junglegymnegotiations.com for your nomination. We are honored! Official rules for the Liebster award: List 11 random facts about yourself. Answer the questions designated by the blogger(s) who nominated you. Place YOUR nominations for the Liebster Award! Nominate five (or more) other bloggers who have less than 200 followers. Make sure to […]
Reader Mail, Part 2: How Do You Plan for a Year of Writing Workshop?
We love reader mail! On Monday, we began our answer to Cassie’s brilliant query. Here is the second part of our answer: How do we build our workshops & the lessons that go in them? When we first started writing workshop, we religiously referred to a chart on page 13 of Write Beside Them: “Writing: […]
Reader Mail: How do you begin the writing workshop year?
Below is a recent email we received: I am a second year ELA teacher with seniors from Ohio and a huge fan of Moving Writers. After completing my first year of teaching I realized direct instruction, novel unit comprehension questions and crosswords, and assigning writing was not working in my classroom. I spent last summer […]
Resource Roundup: Mentors for Teaching Satire & Humor Writing
When people ask me if I’m excited for summer, I sound my barbaric yawp over the schoolhouses of the world–but not for the reasons most suspect. Don’t get me wrong: I love waking up to my own internal clock and sipping on my coffee slowly. I love having time to wade through all the house […]
2.5 Successes and a Failure
It’s June. My students will leave my classroom this week. They hope they will be successful on their exams. I hope they will take their writer’s notebooks with them and not leave them in my room, or in a locker or, God forbid, in a nearby trashcan. As I look back on this school year, […]
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