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 […]
Rubrics tend to be about compliance, not thinking…
This month Abigail takes you through 3 quick ways to jumpstart your writing. If you need a February pick me up.. this is for you.
Someone recently asked me if my posts on Moving Writers this year are sponsored by Newkirk’s publishers.
Often, the what of holding writing conferences isn’t the problem… it’s the how. How to you manage the rest of the class while conferring one on one? How do you find the physical space in a packed classroom? How do you record writing conferences in a meaningful way that will help you and students down […]
In his 1995 work, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, astrophysicist Carl Sagan wrote a sentence that would be uttered in classrooms around the world for decades to come: “there’s no such thing as a dumb question.” We’ll assume, of course, that Sagan is excluding the students in your class who […]
Mentor Text: “Can you hear the hum? How Jordan Tannahill’s The Listeners illuminated my experience with mental illness” by Alicia Elliott Techniques: Exploring and expressing personal connections Including research in a personal essay Writing a conclusion Background – If you’re a reader of Mentor Text Wednesdays, then you might do what I do – flag passages, […]
There’s a saying a lot of students at my school use. If something unfortunate happens that they want to shake off— they’re having a bad day, they drop their iPad on the floor, they accidentally bump into someone on the way into class— you might hear them say it. When I first heard the expression, […]
The phrase, “a message in a bottle,” conjures an image of a weather-beaten bottle, bearing a message from an earnest sender. It came to mind as I prepared to share a National Geographic encyclopedic entry about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch with my students. Eager to provide them with more opportunities to process the implications […]
This year on Moving Writers, my “beat” returns to poetry as a foundational element of a writing classroom. Each month’s post will examine how we can learn about an aspect of writing from a specific poem or poems, then look at what it might sound like to extend those ideas to a writing lesson in […]
