LATEST BLOG POSTS

Do you ever find yourself staring at a blank page, desperately trying to come up with a writing prompt that'll actually engage your students?

Heroes and heroism have always been captivating subjects, transcending time and culture. In an English class, these themes offer an excellent opportunity to engage middle school and high school students in meaningful discussions, critical thinking, and creative expression. This blog post will provide a range of activities and lessons to inspire and educate students about heroes and heroism.

Characterization is a literary element that provides an accessible window into literary analysis. It is important in literary analysis because it helps us to understand the characters in a text and their motivations. By understanding the characters, we can better understand the plot, themes, and meaning of the text.

Here you'll find 12 engaging mini lessons to integrate teaching reading and writing poetry. Each lesson includes an objective, hook, and activity. There are lots of links to other resources too!

The collaborative, or “group” essay concept, is a staple in business schools and college curriculums. It’s a strategy that on the surface may seem to work in encouraging group participation in the writing process, and there are certainly cases where this happens. However, it is a strategy that comes with both pros and cons in the secondary English Language Arts classroom.

Women’s History Month is a particularly exciting month to celebrate:  there are so many brilliant, talented, and inspirational women to honor and that’s what this blog post is all about.  The women here are women whose stories always push my students to write creatively, critically, and think about the world in a whole new way.

As writing teachers, we can get so bogged down with meeting the demands of standardized testing and drilling our students on analytical writing skills that we can lose sight of the fact that writing can be FUN!

This blog post includes six steps for teaching students about complete sentences, fragments, and run-on in an engaging way for students. There are examples of complete sentences and fragments included too!

Halloween is a fun time of year to lean into the high energy, sugar driven madness of our students. Here is a free download Write the Room activity that can be used in at least two different ways any time of the spooky season!