How do we take the “encyclopedia voice” (Mariconda) many students come into the classroom having been taught, and turn it into Walt Whitman’s much-lauded “barbaric yawp”?
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Eileen Landay and Kurt Wooton founded The ArtsLiteracy Project to bring arts integration into classrooms around the world, and their book, A Reason to Read, shows how it works and why it’s so powerful.
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As a writing teacher, the grading load can be pretty overwhelming. We’ve all carried that tattered folder stuffed with papers to and fro, to and fro, dragging it along to family vacations, coffee shops, and anywhere else where we think we might actually find the time to sit down and give feedback. But ack. Somehow the time never seems to come. And the folder just keeps getting more battered.
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It’s the perfect time for a holiday writing project. Something that mixes a little magic in with the skills you want your students to be practicing anyway. Something the elf on your shelf will be able to report back to your department chair actually kept students on task right before break.
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Empower students to thrive in the digital mediums they are likely to encounter in most jobs these days. It’s time to dive into how to write video scripts, podcasts, blogging and even social media captions. Let students experiment in these modern writing genres and you’ll be surprised to discover all that they can do.
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Need an engaging post-reading activity? One-pagers make for a strong assessment on their own, but they are also a great prewriting tool.
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One of my favorite openers is to have students create a poetry collage using striking images they find in modern poets' work. I send them on an online journey through Billy Collins' beautiful project, Poetry 180: A Poem a Day for American High Schools.
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In need of some engaging writing activities for your next Shakespeare unit? Look no further. Check out these nine writing options that work with any Shakespeare play.
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If you'd like to give your students some serious choice, and empower them to write about the topics that truly interest them, blogging just might be the thing for your classroom. Set aside one day a week for your 20% time project, and introduce students to the simple free blogging platform, Blogger.
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We all want our writers to be readers. Reading and writing go hand in hand. But how to hook our students on books? For some, reading is a chore, or something they manage to avoid with a little help from their friends.
Enter, Brynn Allison.
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English teachers, want a fun activity to help student writers learn process from each other? Let them share their best advice for improved writing as part of a colorful display on your wall. Every writer is different, but every writer can gain insight from other writers. Grab the downloadable display freebie in this post.
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Need a fresh idea for getting through to disengaged writers? Reach them with a new kind of prewriting activity, sketchnotes. Check out this post for tips and inspiration for getting started with sketchnotes, plus a fun freebie to guide them through their first sketchnotes paper brainstorm.
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Writing can be highly personal. In our writing, we expose our thought processes, our ideas, our memories and perceptions, even our dreams. In a truly powerful writing community, there must be trust and there must be respect.
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Having your students bring a notebook in to leave in your classroom in the first week of school opens up a huge range of possibilities to you throughout the year. It also allows students to see their own expanding portfolio of different types of writing and their growth as writers throughout the year.
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Angela Stockman's book, Make Writing: 5 Teaching Strategies That Turn Writer's Workshop Into a Maker Space, is absolutely unique. In more than ten years in education, I have never read or heard of this idea before. Stockman proposes we let students "make" their ideas before they write them, combining their physical and mental creativity.
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If there’s one thing I don’t want to do, it’s sit my students down for a three hour matching and multiple choice exam at the end of the year. After nine months of creative units and showcase projects, this type of finale wouldn't be consistent with my course or my goals as a teacher.
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If you're like me, you want a hook for your poetry unit. Something students can grab ahold of when poetry feels too disconnected from their lives.
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