Over the last few months, I’ve been sharing different kinds of language field guide entries that help students explore words and make discoveries about language. (My first installment shared the basics of choice word field guides, the easiest and most fundamental way we explore words. My second post talked about exploring significant words in a text + in […]
In sixteen years of teaching, I have only had less than one handful of students who truly, thoughtfully attended to word choice. It’s gritty and granular — the work of scrutinizing each and every word, turning it over in your mind, considering every other possibility, and landing on the very best word. Few middle or […]
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 […]
moving writers 