A guaranteed speed breaker when I enter a new school year, and meet a new batch of students with renewed enthusiasm is old errors. Do it enough over the years, and you might begin to realize that part of an old-timer’s stoicism in the face of annoying errors lies in foreseeing obstacles and being ready for them as opposed to being taken by surprise.
More importantly, however, the book blurbs and the discussions that followed served as excellent book talks. After each lesson, I saw students quietly picking up many of the books on the slides. I pretended not to look, of course.
I didn’t give them the definitions in the beginning this time. This allowed them to use the learning from the last two lessons and hypothesise what the differences ought to be. The book blurbs on the slides, much like last time, were our opportunities to discuss, argue, ask questions and share our confusion. Towards the end, when clarity was just within reach, I provided the definitions.
My main aim in this lesson is to get students comfortable with identifying boundary conditions of a genre in the face of ambiguity.
In this series, I share one such set of 5 lessons that help students identify genres more accurately. The lessons are:
L1: Prior Knowledge Check
L2: Genre – Meaning and Types
L3: Realistic Fiction vs. Fantasy vs. Historical Fiction
L4: Fantasy vs. Science Fiction
L5: Science Fiction vs. Dystopia.
Nancie Atwell calls theme “the chilliest mind Popsicle” of all the writing lessons that young writers need to learn, and I couldn’t agree more. (Atwell, 2015, 101) Theme is one of the toughest lessons I have had to learn to teach in both reading and writing and by the time I did, I not only […]
My students came to me from a context where conferences were the times in class when the teacher would give 1-1 feedback to them, i.e., the teacher would list a bunch of things that needed to change by the next conference. I found that they spent most of their Independent Writing Time waiting for a […]
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.
moving writers 