Melissa Surber teaches 11th grade Junior and Senior College Prep English and AP Literature and Composition at Troy Buchanan High School in Troy, Missouri, an hour north of St. Louis. She is in her 18th year of teaching and just recently became National Board Certified. Connect with her at @ELAWordsmith. Mentor Texts: Patton Oswalt Facebook […]
My second grader came home the other day and announced he needed to do some research. He was working on an informational book about basketball, he explained. Who am I to stand in the way of a researcher?? He plopped down and got to work. Soon, he had a document filled with all of the […]
Mentor Text: “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams Writing Techniques: Poetic form Focusing on main idea Brevity Background: Last year, I made a conscious decision to dedicate April’s Mentor Text Wednesday posts to poetry, in honor of it being National Poetry Month. I plan to continue that tradition. This week, I want to share […]
My IB teaching partner dropped a calendar page on my desk yesterday morning that reminded me–in its stark black-and-white boxes filled with Easter vacation, early release days, and special schedules–that we have very few weeks left in our semester. That somewhat panicked calendar also means that the Triton Writing Center, the fledgling dream I committed […]
In the stack of marking that I took home, promising myself I’d do before Spring Break ended, sits a stack of Of Mice and Men literary analysis essays. As we worked on them, we had a fair number of conversations about what we were doing, and why. We talked about how, often, exercises like lit […]
Recently, my seniors competed in a state-wide writing competition, and to aid in inspiration and help launch their writing process, I presented students with unique and exciting, low stakes writing opportunities. After reading my students’ writing contest pieces, I was reminded once again of the importance of time spent journaling—of the freedom and release of a writer’s […]
An addition to a lesson that will create confident writers.
Student pre-annotation lets teachers grade writing based on student intentions, resulting in a more robust understanding of their work.
My journey (so far) with differentiating writing instruction to meet each learner’s needs.
Mentor Text: Someone Will Come Along: Rogue One, Logan and Hope by Jessica Plummer Writing Techniques: Writing Literary Analysis Essay Structure Background: If, as Stephen King would say, you are a “Faithful Reader,” then you know I’m a bit of a geek. If you’re here for the first time… Hi, I’m Jay, and I really […]
