In the 2020-2021 school year, the Inside the Blended Workshop Community was founded to help teachers navigate the unknowns of teaching in a pandemic, teaching students in person and online simultaneously, and moving our common practices to a fully blended-learning world. Now, Inside the Blended Workshop is becoming the Moving Writers Community — a group […]
One of the most rewarding aspects of my Moving Writers beat is hearing from other educators about how they encourage students to identify when they feel they are a part of Nature and not merely apart from it. Despite receiving a constant barrage of information, or perhaps because of it, our information-glutted minds seem to […]
I recently read Simon Sinek’s The Infinite Game. In this book, he builds upon the ideas in James P. Carse’s work titled Finite and Infinite Games. As Carse’s original title suggests, there are two games in our world: finite and infinite. Exploring this concept, Sinek explains the contrast of these two games with specific criteria. […]
It think it’s safe to say that for most of us, this school year felt like several different years. In my school there were remote portions, hybrid portions, five-day-return portions, and with just a few days left in the school year, a masks-optional portion. Texting teacher friends throughout the year, I have used a rickety […]
Have you been able to take a deep breath yet? I hope so. Cause I don’t know about you, but it feels as though this past year happened to me — too much time spent being reactive. And now I need to just take some deep breaths — a lot of them. Because before I can […]
Over the last few months, I’ve been sharing different kinds of language field guide entries that help students explore words and make discoveries about language. (My first installment shared the basics of choice word field guides, the easiest and most fundamental way we explore words. My second post talked about exploring significant words in a text + in […]
My 40th birthday is in a couple of days, June 6th to be exact. I expected this to be a difficult time in my life as I don’t like accepting that I’m getting older (turning 30 involved a lot of crying!). It has been kind of the opposite; it has made me appreciate the cliche […]
In Abigail’s final post of the year she walks you through an end of the year reflection activity which could be done in any class/grade level. End the year with filling your classroom with words.
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.
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 […]
