Consider it your holiday gift to your students: The gift of fun.
Recently …
Place-Based Poetry Writing “Slow Unit”
Sometime during the first week of school this year, I taped this note to my desk: I wanted this year to be different. Not just different than the last few years of COVID School, but different than all the other years of my teaching that valued efficiency and productivity almost above all. (I love efficiency. […]
Mentor Text Wednesday: Purple World
Mentor Text: Purple World by Richard Wagamese Techniques: Introductions Conclusions Background – Sometimes, my path to a mentor text to share with you feels kind of random. We’re at the halfway point of the first semester, and I’ve been doing some planning for the second half. I was talking to one of my colleagues about this, […]
4 Ways to Spark Joy in Writing
This month Abigail shares 4 things you can do this next week to spark joy in your writing class. Hope you feel inspired and that the spark would be ignited.
The Benefits of Writing 3: Remembering Your Life
Speaking as a teacher of 30 years experience who has, for all of those 30 years, asked students to write about their lives, I can only say I have never had a student complain about writing about their lives after the fact.
A New Spin on an Old Text: The Catcher in the R(I)
(See what I did there?) “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I […]
Mentor Text Wednesday: Softball team at the ferry terminal after Provincials
Mentor Text: Softball team at the ferry terminal after Provincials by Kirsten Pendreigh Techniques: Memoir Imagery Point of View Background – One of my favourite autumn traditions recently happened – I picked up a copy of The Best American Poetry 2022. And last year, I added The Best Canadian Poetry annual volume to this tradition. Perhaps […]
Using Two-Pagers to Fuel Analytical Writing
I’ll admit: I’m a sucker for beautiful notebook work. I will tell students that the quality of the thinking is really what matters — and I mean it. But I also swoon when I see gorgeous notebook pages. I associate gorgeous “two-page spreads” with Penny Kittle and the thinking she has been sharing with teachers […]
Making All Things New: Rules for Writers
This year on Moving Writer’s, 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 Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems by Mary […]
Mentor Text Wednesday: 1986
Mentor Text: 1986 from Music is History by Questlove Techniques: Writing about an image Changing opinions in writing Connecting memoir to something else Background – I love books about music. Memoirs, biographies and books that analyze music, any kind of music, even if I don’t really listen to it, just fascinate me. Last spring, I read […]
