A Brief Podcasting Primer If you don’t already know what a podcast is, it’s basically a radio show that people can stream or download to their own devices. It’s like listening to radio a la carte in that you can pick and choose what episodes you want to listen to–and you have the power to […]
Tag: Genius Hour
Deep Dives and Side Quests: Idea Gold Mines
As an American now living and teaching in Canada, I’ve had to learn a lot in a short period of time. I’m teaching a self-contained 3rd + 4th grade class this year, which means I’m teaching Social Studies, and the American Education system doesn’t really give us all that much about our neighbors to the […]
Moving Writers’ Top Ten: Genius Hour & Individualized Grammar Practice
As is our habit, we are taking the summer away from the blog to read, write, and recharge. We’ll be back in late August with new content, but for the summer, let’s take a journey down memory lane as we visit our ten most-read posts from the previous school year! This semester I’m bringing […]
Genius Hour + Writing Workshop: Do-Overs and Take-Aways
This semester I’ve been chronicling my first-ever experiment with Genius Hour and its intersection with the regular machinations of our writing workshop. You can catch up on the other posts in this series before diving into this wrap up! ________________________________________________________________________________________ Genius Hour, and the school year, are almost over. My students are writing their final […]
Genius Hour + Writing Workshop: Broadening the Definition of “Research”
This semester I’m sharing my experiment with bringing Genius Hour into my writing workshop. You can catch up on the rest of the series here. I don’t have many crystal-clear high school English class memories, believe it or not, but one of them is sitting in the library with my 11th grade class, a stack […]
Genius Hour + Writing Workshop: This Is How We Blog It
I’m spending the next few posts sharing how I’m using Genius Hour to help kids follow their passions to deeper research, learning, and, of course, writing! You can see past posts here: Introduction + Context Finding, Developing, and Pitching Ideas Beyond conferring with students, blogging is the only formal accountability system I am using in […]
Genius Hour + Writing Workshop: Finding, Developing, and Pitching Ideas
For the next few weeks, I am going to share about how my experiment with Genius Hour intersects writing workshop — and how giving kids choice and freedom to access their passion helps you do it all! If you need to get caught up, I gave an introduction and overview in my first post in […]
Genius Hour & the Writing Workshop – a new series!
Reading and Writing Workshop are my teaching superpowers and my kryptonite. While the workshop model enables me to be the teacher I want to be to empower my students to be the kind of students they are truly capable of being, they can occasionally make me hesitant to try new models. I love consistency (so do […]