How do we get students to buy into writing? How do we begin to hear their stories. Oral storytelling is a way to engage your writers in a low stakes way and create a basis for a really strong writing community.
Tag: featured
FREE 6-12 Writing Mini-Lessons for the New School Year!
After a six-month soft launch, Sam and I are officially launching Mini Moves for Writers, a YouTube channel where anyone can access free writing mini-lessons to make writing stronger, more full of voice, and more true to your writerly intentions. Here’s a wee trailer: We hope that we can be apart of your writing instruction […]
Notebook Time for a New School Year
Every teacher has their own way of preparing for a new school year. I like to try out writing activities I might share with my students and see what I notice. What possibilities exist with this writing exercise? Is it something I could embed in all my classes? And a more interesting question of late–How […]
First Writing Moves of the School Year
In this summer’s beat Abigail takes you through two strategies that you can discover in Liz Prather’s new book “The Confidence to Write”… two strategies to start the school year off right and a great starting place for teacher growth this summer.
Dream Boards
In this school years last beat Abigail takes you through a writing strategy of “dream/vision boards” to cast a vision for the future with your students.
Science Writing…For Kids!
Sodium Polyacrylate In science, my 4th graders are learning about the Law of Conservation of Matter after about a week of reviewing ideas around solids, liquids, and gases. Instead of doing the classic cornstarch and water lab, I decided to try something new this time around. If you go online, you can find packets of […]
A Perfect Personification Mentor Text
Abigail takes us through a mentor text which has endless amount of uses. She gives you a quick guide to this perfect personification mentor and hopes you will try it out too.
An Alternate Script for the Embarrassed Self
I’m very happy that my idea of creating Embarrassment Free Zones resonated with many teachers and students. My goal in this post is to establish that there are situations when Free Zones won’t work. Yes, that’s right.
Turn Local History into Advocacy with Three Different Writing Projects
One of my biggest challenges as a teacher is getting students to feel connected to history. To them, especially at the middle school age, history might as well be the Milky Way– kids are told that it’s real and that they are a part of it, but the scope of history often has such galactical […]
First Year Writing Teacher Support: Reserve Time for Revision
Hang in there, new teacher, you’re almost to the finish line. By this point in the school year, you’ve definitely had your students write a thing or two. So you now know that getting students to write perfectly polished drafts is a lot harder than meets the eye. I know when I first started teaching, […]
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