As this post drops, I’m wrapping up the second week of the new semester. I’ve got new courses, new students and new ideas. One of the first things that I try to establish is the importance of our notebooks. I actually try to do a lot of our work, our writing, our responding… our thinking […]
Using mentors to teach literary analysis makes sense. Beginning in elementary school, students are engaged in some form of literary analysis. In fact, my second grade daughter, works out her analytical muscles on the regular. Her (amazing) teacher provides her students with plenty of scaffolding and sentence starters. She coaches them with exercises like I […]
Hello, friends! Oh, how we have missed you! Allison and I are still in the midst of finishing our new book on teaching analytical writing, but we couldn’t resist a quick check-in with you to share some of what we have been up to! Yesterday we had the great fun of doing an hour of virtual […]
Maybe you’ve got the broad strokes of teaching with mentor texts — show students authentic examples of writing in a genre to guide and inspire their own writing. But what does this look like in your plan book? How do you move students from reading like readers to reading like writers? How do you introduce […]
How adopting a mentor text approach to writing instruction is actually helping me teach reading comprehension
Mentor Texts: Rolling Stone magazine’s Threat Assessment infographic Entertainment Weekly magazine’s The Bullseye infographic Writing Techniques: Organizing information Tone Visual presentation Background: Hi. I’m Jay and I’m a recovering magazineaholic. I’ve mentioned it here before, but magazines are wonderful things, especially for a mentor text based teacher. They contain, if you’re getting a variety of […]
Facepalm. By the second panel of the 2017 Greater Madison Writing Project symposium, “From High School to College: Engaging in Writing Dialogue,” you could have made a meme of me (or at least my inner monologue, since I managed to keep my outer composure), sitting like Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Captain Picard with my head […]
I’ve been scrolling through Twitter a lot these past two weeks. I can’t look away from the news and everything I read is prompting new questions and new things I need to research. Saturday, someone tweeted a poem by Naomi Shihab-Nye, Gate A-4. It’s a beautiful story of an interaction between two women in an […]
Mentor Text: excerpt from “Who Wants to Shoot an Elephant” by Wells Tower Writing Techniques: Research writing Writing counterargument Exploring difficult issues Expanding writing Background: It is a terribly kept secret that I am a huge fan of The Best American series. These annual collections of writing litter my workspaces, and live in every corner […]
When an attempt at motivating a student goes wrong, professional positivity is a must.
moving writers 