As English teachers, we often fancy ourselves not just teachers of reading and writing, but keepers of a sacred flame: Culture. For better and worse, we’ve hitched our wagon to both the humanities and the arts and made it our role to help make students both literate and “worldly”. It’s an interesting time to […]
I think what I liked most about middle school was the fact that I had two English classes: Language Arts AND Reading. Now, as a high school English teacher with three sections of an intensive literature course, I often think back to middle school and wish my classes were twice as long so I could […]
There are lots of ways to “do” research in a secondary classroom–everything from small writing pieces with just a little research to full-blown research projects that span several weeks. However you do it, though, it can get messy quickly. How do we show them all the rules of citation without overwhelming them? How do we […]
I’ve found over the years that “writing workshop” means a lot of things to a lot of people. So, what does it mean to have a writing workshop functioning in your classroom? How do you even take the first step? This semester, my regular every-other-Monday “beat” will focus on the fundamental building blocks of writing […]
Image via publicdomainpictures.net Let’s face it: no matter how well we run our reading and writing workshops, there are about a hundred different points in any given class period where problems can crop up. There’s no such thing as a perfect lesson plan, and as a result, teachers have to be decision making machines on a […]
Today’s guest post comes to us from one of our 100 Days of Summer Writing participants, Erin Palazzo. Erin is a high school English teacher in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. She loves helping teens fall in love with reading and develop confidence in writing through mentor texts and readers & writers workshops. Her students would also add that […]
Mentor Text: The Truth From The Cave by Justin Rawdon Lipscomb Techniques: Writing Memoir Crafting a Line Background – One of the things I love about using mentor texts, and building mentor text sets is how a piece can add life to a lesson. At the end of the summer, making sure I had enough […]
Quick Blurb About My Fall Beat As Rebekah mentioned in her back-to-school series introductory post, each of us will be dedicating a lot of our thinking and writing to a particular “beat” during the fall semester. There may be days we blog outside of our beat simply because another idea or experiment has risen to the […]
Over the years, I’ve probably revised my writing lesson plans more times than I’ve moved classrooms, and through that, I’ve come to learn that some of my best writing instruction is rooted right back where my reading instruction takes place: my classroom library.
I found it difficult to narrow down the multiple facets that are currently saving my life at the start of this school year. There are so many little pieces constructing the giant puzzle of my teaching and personal world. My first idea: Why team teaching with your best friend is highly recommended – shout out […]
