Until our students see that writing can offer more than points and grades, they won’t fully engage with it.
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The Benefits of Writing 11: Better Decision-Making
One of main benefits of writing, so far as I have been able to figure out, is that is helps you make decisions.
Mentor Text Wednesday: The Red House
Mentor Text: excerpt from ‘The Red House‘ by Robert R. McCammon Techniques: Introduction Background – Over the last few years, I’ve really thrown myself back into the horror genre. It began with The Kingcast podcast becoming a fave, and drawing me back into Constant Readership, but rediscovering horror movies and beginning to explore middle years spooky […]
Mentor Text Wednesday: Potato
Mentor Text: Potato by Rebekah Rempel Techniques: Exploring a symbol Background – The last two months of school are challenging, eh? If I’m not in teacher mode planning the end of my courses, laying the groundwork for next year or marking, I’m in parent mode, shuttling everyone everywhere. As I’ve shared before, I always grab my […]
The Benefits of Writing 10: Perspective Taking and Points of View
To really persuade someone, you need to show them you understand their point of view.
Core-Concept One-Pagers: A Fast, Meaningful Content Wrap-Up
To be honest, this isn’t really a writing post. Students do write in this activity, but truly this has much more to do with reading comprehension and synthesis. It was a lightning bolt that struck me at just the right time to help me quickly wrap up a reading unit, so I wanted to share […]
Free PD All Summer from the Vaults in the Moving Writers Community
The Moving Writers Community is designed to be a place for reading and writing teachers to dig deeper and more authentically with one another than the Moving Writers blog can do. It’s a place where I share the real life of my daily classroom (including occasional confessions about how absolutely horribly my Macbeth unit went […]
All Things Made New: My New Book About Writing
This year on Moving Writers, I’ve spotlighted re-reads of some older books about writing, and not all of them by teachers. Together, we examined the writer’s inner life with the poet Ted Hughes, practiced memory writing with the book Metro: Journeys in Writing Creatively, and honed our questions for conferring with the wonderful Barry Lane. […]
Mentor Text Wednesday: Leading us to Revelation
Mentor Text: Leading Us To Revelation: On Rita Dove by Jericho Brown Techniques: Analysis Introduction & Conclusion Titling Background – I’ve had a subscription to POETRY Magazine for a few years now. And I almost never finish an issue. Issues travel with me in my school bag. Issues are lugged to dance and swim practices in […]
Making Grading Writing Easier with Frankenstein-ed Conversational Rubrics
In my dream-teaching world, I wouldn’t really grade anything at all. I’d sit down with each student and have a roomy conversation with them — leisurely, with lots of time for getting sidetracked if we want. And we’d talk about their work: what they did, what they tried to do, what I admired, what still […]
