Today’s post is from a guest, Kelly Pace. Kelly teaches 9th, 11th, and 12th grade English and Theory of Knowledge to students at my former school home in Hanover County, Virginia. And aren’t they lucky to have her? Kelly has been regularly emailing me the mentor texts she is using with her students, and this […]
Tag: mini-lesson
Mentor Text Wednesday: Concrete Details
Mentor Texts: “Has Snowboarding Lots Its Edge” by Christopher Solomon. The New York Times, 16 January 2013. “A Sports Star’s ‘Crash,’ Then The Search For A New Normal” by Ian Buckwalter. NPR, 4 July 2013. “Snowboarding”. Essayforum.com. “The Power of Snowboarding” by Jordan. ThisIBelieve.org, 15 December 2010. Writing Technique: Using concrete details Background: I am experimenting […]
A Lesson for Tomorrow: Using Art to Teach Repetition in Writing and Reading
Students are great barometers of lesson effectiveness. At the end of each writing workshop genre study, I ask students to reflect on the lessons that had an impact on their thinking and writing. When asked which mini-lesson she found to be the least helpful in our memoir genre study, a student wrote: The mini-lesson I […]
Showing-Versus-Telling & The Walking Dead
The first twenty minutes of the pilot episode of The Walking Dead is virtually silent. I hadn’t remembered that when, out of desperation and end-of-October exhaustion, I agreed to show the episode to my ninth graders on Halloween. They begged. I was weak. In a lame effort to sound educational, I grasped wildly for one of our recent mini-lessons. […]
