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 […]
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The Fifth Pillar of Writing Workshop
Lucy Calkins says that kids “need to see their work reach other readers.” This explains why I spent much of winter break planning and writing posts for the new blog, checking blog stats, and refreshing my Twitter feed. Have my words reached anyone? Have they made a difference? A blogging neophyte, I had almost forgotten […]
Showing-Versus-Telling & The Walking Dead
The first twenty minutes of the pilot episode of The Walking Dead is virtually silent. I hadn’t remembered that when, out of desperation and end-of-October exhaustion, I agreed to show the episode to my ninth graders on Halloween. They begged. I was weak. In a lame effort to sound educational, I grasped wildly for one of our recent mini-lessons. […]
New Year’s (Writing Workshop) Resolutions (or, Why Didn’t I Do This in August???)
Midterms are over, and we have reached the point of the year where, inevitably, I second guess every decision I have made so far and long for a do-over. And while this year hasn’t been without its victories, I still wonder, What ever happened to that uber-planned-perfectly-balanced class I dreamed of while I sat by […]
Step-by-Step: The Value of Mini Mentor Texts
A few months before our wedding, my husband and I signed up for private dance lessons at the local dance studio. On the first day, we were brought into a small room with a large rectangular window that looked out into the main ballroom. Professional dancers in street clothes leapt and arabesqued across the wooden […]
The “Data” that Writing Workshop Works
I hear twitters and giggles behind me as I hurriedly move from student to student for writing conferences. I don’t have time to turn around, I think, working my way between desks. They – and I – always get anxious as we wrap up a genre study. Last-minute questions need answering. Mini-lessons need pointing to. […]
Moving Writers … an Invitation
Eight hours before your presentation at NCTE isn’t the time for second guessing. Huddled on a hotel bed, surrounded by a sea of papers, laptops, and California Pizza Kitchen take-out, we debated. Something was missing. After months of polishing the fundamentals, something wasn’t right. Something we couldn’t put our finger on. Some meaning for which […]
moving writers 