As a first year teacher, I was so excited to teach writing. When I sat down to plan my year the summer before it started, I had so many writing units planned. I wanted my students to write paper after paper, knowing they needed the practice but also hoping they would begin to view writing […]
Mentor Text: Love by Alex Dimitrov Techniques: Editing and revising Using a seed line Background – I openly declare my great love of Best of the Year poetry collections. For a number of years, I’ve made a point of making sure I make my way through The Best American Poetry, and this year, I’ve added The […]
I love a good digital choice board — a way for students to have a self-directed choice in their learning. You can make choice boards out of anything, but you can also curate your own choice board using Mini Moves for Writers videos. I’ve made you one choice board below: four different mini moves that […]
Every writer needs something a little bit different, which is one of the things that makes writing instruction so challenging! But whether the writers in your room need a bit of skill review (one of those things you assumed they “should know how to do by now”) or needs a bit of a challenge (so […]
Yesterday’s Mini Moves for Writers subscriber giveaway was ADAM NOACK! Adam, please get in touch with me to claim your prize. One of our favorite features of Mini Moves for Writers is the sheer number of different ways they can be used to support your student writers. So far this week we’ve seen how they […]
Yesterday’s winner in our Mini Moves for Writers subscriber giveaway is STACEY REEDER! Stacy, please contact me at movingwriters@gmail.com to get your free copy of A TEACHER’S GUIDE TO MENTOR TEXTS! We’re giving away prizes all week — subscribe to our channel to make sure you are entered to win! Sentence study is a bedrock […]
Welcome to the official Mini Moves for Writers launch week! We’re so excited to share this new project with you — one we hope will help you, make your teaching life easier, and move the writers in your classroom. Each day this week we will be sharing a new idea for how to use these […]
We hope you’re loving the sneak peeks at Mini Moves for Writers we’ve been sharing this week. Next week is our official LAUNCH WEEK! We can’t wait! Today, we’re sharing a new move: Figurative Language that Makes You Go ‘Huh!’. This move engages the reader by painting specific pictures in the reader’s mind, and it […]
I’ve been writing about how the pandemic and virtual teaching has made me rethink all kinds of things about my teaching practices, but the one topic I’ve been avoiding is the biggest. It has probably been the biggest teaching shift I’ve made in my 20 years of teaching…and yet I’ve been hesitant to talk about […]
Catch up on the whole mini-mentors series! Mini-Mentors for Review Writing, Prompt-Based Writing, and Revision! In the previous iterations of this series, I’ve suggested some ways you might use these mini-mentors in your own classroom: as sentence study warm-ups, as whole-class lessons, in small-group and individual writing conferences. But, you’ll notice something different and special […]
moving writers 