Mentor Texts: First few paragraphs of “The Tell Tale Heart” by Edgar Allen Poe Various photographs of your choice “After I Was Thrown Into the River and Before I Drown” by Dave Eggers Big Idea: Writers use syntax purposefully to create meaning and a desired effect. What’s ahead in this post: A 3-day lesson series […]
Tag: Notebook Time
3 Tips for Using Literature as Mentor Texts
Teaching is often a balancing act. We’re constantly balancing, sometimes battling, the seemingly opposing forces of lesson planning vs. grading, eating the cake in the workroom vs. not eating the cake in the workroom, literature study vs. writing study. But why can’t we have our cake and eat it, too? And by cake, I mean writing. […]
Voice Lessons: Helping Students Find Their Writerly Voices
Lessons to help students explore their unique and original voices in writing.
Watch Us on #theEdCollabGathering!
What a thrill it was to go LIVE this morning with #theEdCollabGathering to chat about Notebook Time and the ways it moves our student writers forward through play and discovery! You can view our session here, on The Educator Collaborative’s Gathering site, or here on YouTube! You can get all of our materials by […]
#TheEdCollabGathering: Unearthing Discovery & Play
Did you know that on April 2, Chris Lehman and the generous geniuses at The Educator Collaborative are giving away a whole day of brilliant, free PD that you can watch from home in your jammies? We would love to have you join Allison and me from 11-12pm as we talk about bringing play back to the […]
Sentence Study to Textual Analysis — an Aha! moment
In 2014, I attended Alison and Rebekah’s presentation at NCTE in Washington, DC, and left buzzing about so much of what they shared, especially sentence studies. For reluctant writers like my freshmen, a sentence study is a great way to ease into creative writing or new sentence styles. The thought of writing a paragraph sometimes […]
Making Time for Vocabulary Instruction that Matters
Years and years ago, before I had been bitten by the writing workshop bug, I became obsessed with vocabulary instruction. My school used a series of vocabulary workbooks at each grade level, and I had witnessed how that approach didn’t worked. Not for real. Not for the long term. Some students would dutifully memorize the […]
Summer Mentor Text Countdown — Week 3
Our students use multiple mentor texts constantly throughout the writing process — from planning all the way through publication. But our students also encounter daily mentor texts as they play with words and ideas in notebook time, our amped-up, mentor-text-based bell ringer. These mentor texts are very different from the ones we use in our […]
Mentor Text Monday: Engaging Students with HUMANS OF NEW YORK
Mentor Text: Humans of New York — blog and book by Brandon Stanton Also: LIttle Humans —book by Brandon Stanton Writing Techniques: Effective interviewing Fusing images and text Concision & drilling down to the essentials Background: While I’m off, I am dreaming of the mentor texts and units of study that will fill my second […]
Notebook Time: What It Is & Why We Do It
Rebekah and I often often tweet ideas for notebook time, and recently many of you have been asking us to explain it and show how it fits into the workshop. Put simply, notebook time is an opportunity for students to play in their notebooks with different ideas, information, and genres. In our classrooms, notebook time […]
