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Mentor Text Wednesday – Elegies for Lost Voices
Mentor Text: Elegies for Lost Voices – four poems by Scott Nolan. Techniques: Background – Maybe this is because I spent time last night listening to Gordon Lightfoot in the wake of his passing. Maybe it’s because I need to prep a lesson plan for next week in my Lit class where we’re writing about music […]
The Benefits of Writing 9: Exploring and Expressing Enthusiasms
For those students, taking any spark of enthusiasm they show and fanning it to a flame, and helping it spread to other possible enthusiasms, becomes one of my goals.
All Things Made New: A Classic of Classroom Revision
This year on Moving Writers, I am dusting off some old-but-wise books on my shelf about writing, creating a tiny review, then considering how one passage from the book can inform writing instruction today, even decades after the book was first published. This month, I’ll consider After The End by Barry Lane, the original edition. […]
Summer 2023: Camp Rewrite
For those who have been around Moving Writers for awhile, we typically shutter (or go very quiet) for the summer to give both teachers and our writers a well-deserved break before the new year begins. But, if for you summer is equal parts rest and creative sprint as you gather inspiration for the new year, […]
Syntax Study for Earth Day
Placing Maggie Smith’s “Good Bones” and Craig Santos Perez’s “Good Fossil Fuels” side by side can elicit a wide-ranging classroom conversation about the ways the climate crisis is downplayed. Through describing points of convergence and divergence, students can ponder how the “recycled” aspects of Smith’s syntax and prosody appearing in Perez’s poem challenge their thinking […]
Mentor Text Wednesday – from Stay True
Mentor Text: excerpt from Stay True by Hua Hsu Techniques: Background – The week in which I’m writing this is one of those weeks we have as teachers, where we’re overwhelmed with obligations and expectations. A couple of weeks ago, when I felt like I had a bit more breathing room, I was reading Hua […]
Mentor Text Wednesday: Fairy-tale Logic
Mentor Text: Fairy-tale Logic by A.E. Stallings Techniques: Background – In my Grade 9 class right now, we’re working on our essays discussing scary stories. We do a little short film study, allowing us to practice analysis skills, and give us some fun ground to cover in an early essay this semester, learning the ropes of […]
The Benefits of Learning 8: Questioning
Writing is the act of asking yourself hard questions and then trying to answer them.
An End-of-the-Year Essay Unit Plan that Brings Students + Literature Together
When Allison and I wrote Beyond Literary Analysis, we read thousands of pieces of writing in the quest to figure out what kind of analysis professional, published writer truly write outside academia. In other words, beyond what English teachers have culturally and historically deemed to be our analytical territory, what kind of analytical writing will […]
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