This ready-to-use mini grammar unit aims to provide a framework for the student to systematically learn and use articles in their spoken and written English. Slides included.
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Finishing the Action Plan: Expectations vs. Reality
Image via Pixabay If you’ve been following my posts this semester, you know I’ve been working on getting my students to look at research in a different light. I wanted to make the process more real world applicable to my students, so I designed a “Teens Take Action” project with my school librarian to give […]
Mentor Text Wednesday: A Story About Tim Duncan
Mentor Text: A Story About Tim Duncan by Shea Serrano (PDF/online) Techniques: Writing Memoir Introducing and Concluding Background – This is my May post. It’s close to the end of the year. Some of us are done already, some of us still have some time to go. Wherever we fall in that, it’s been an […]
The Time Capsule Narrative
In Sharon Olds’ poem “Ode to Dirt,” the speaker opens with an apology, explaining I thought you were only the background for the leading characters—the plants and animals and human animals. Thinking about parts of nature in isolation from other parts is an all too familiar tendency. The act of overlooking the role of soil […]
Explosion, 2021: A Post-In-Verse
I have bent under the weight
of it all and
I am yet
unbroken.
What’s Next? Questions I’m Pondering After a Year of Hybrid Teaching
“The CDC says…” so very many things, especially lately. It’s been a year of finding our footing and then having the rug pulled out from under us as national, statewide, or community guidance changes. We’ve been building the plane as we fly it and then hopping out of the plane with patched-over parachutes just as […]
Front-loading the Writing Process: Reducing the Cognitive Load
Picasso’s quote may seem somewhat contradictory as giving answers is not necessarily a useless trait; however, dig a little deeper and it makes a lot of sense. Computers (or rather Google) give us the answers we are looking for — we receive an output for a question asked. This isn’t necessarily a negative thing — […]
Identity Synthesis: Authenticity, Vulnerability, and Revision
This year in my school district, my colleagues and I have held rich and ongoing conversations about ways to be more culturally and historically responsive in our curriculum and instruction. Within these conversations, we discovered that part of being more responsive in these matters involves valuing our students’ sense of identity in their learning. In […]
Discovering Students’ OWN Language through Field Guides
This semester, I’m sharing how my students create language field guides to intentionally and systematically explore words in their reading, their writing, and their lives, not just memorize parts of speech and definitions. My first installment shared the basics of choice word field guides, the easiest and most fundamental way we explore words. My second […]
Bios, Threads, & Retweets: Moving Writers with Twitter Simulations
We know that writing strategies are everywhere. And, I am amazed at the amount of writing skills and strategies that are embedded into social media platforms. Although the student writer may not actually notice the author’s craft and intention that goes into well-crafted tweets, they are there in abundance, and I realized recently that these […]
moving writers 