As a first year teacher, I was so excited to teach writing. When I sat down to plan my year the summer before it started, I had so many writing units planned. I wanted my students to write paper after paper, knowing they needed the practice but also hoping they would begin to view writing […]
Someone recently asked me if my posts on Moving Writers this year are sponsored by Newkirk’s publishers.
In his 1995 work, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, astrophysicist Carl Sagan wrote a sentence that would be uttered in classrooms around the world for decades to come: “there’s no such thing as a dumb question.” We’ll assume, of course, that Sagan is excluding the students in your class who […]
The phrase, “a message in a bottle,” conjures an image of a weather-beaten bottle, bearing a message from an earnest sender. It came to mind as I prepared to share a National Geographic encyclopedic entry about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch with my students. Eager to provide them with more opportunities to process the implications […]
Why do the details matter? Abigail talks about taking your students writing and reflections deeper with a couple moves in writers workshop with the help of mentors and figurative writing.
Far from admitting to a teacher, many of my students don’t want to admit to themselves that they’re struggling with something. They prefer not knowing, passing, and faking their way out of a task to the sheer torture of the confession of their struggles.
Choosing the right writing workshop (say that five times fast) at the right time in a content-based classroom will have a large impact on the success of your writing instruction. A workshop that is too complex or does not serve your class’s current needs could also derail your unit, resulting in total heartbreak for you and your students. Preview five, eligible workshops that will adapt to your curriculum and help your students write like historians.
I love reading New Year’s listicle articles. It’s fun to look back on the Top 10 best films of the past year and look forward to the Top 22 Things to Do in 2022. So with the new year approaching in just a few days, I thought I’d jump on the bandwagon and offer you […]
Welcome to Write Like a Historian! In this series, we’ll explore how to bring writing workshop into the social studies classroom. Every student is a historian. Let’s teach them how to write like one.
On being asked if they would risk being stigmatized so that they move forward in their learning, the majority of the students said, “Yes, I would.” How many times in the last week/month had they taken such a risk? “Almost never,” they admitted. Even though students may be consciously aware that they must put their learning over their fear of stigma, very few are able to do it at the moment it matters. Isolation and ridicule are scary, especially during the teen years when the need to belong is paramount.
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