Calling all budding authors, poets, and storytellers in your classes. Writing competitions are a great way to motivate students to write. They give students a real world context for writing and also give students the chance to earn prizes.
Heroes and the Hero’s Journey: Lessons and Activities for Your Next Heroism Unit
Book Shelfie Activity to Foster a Love of Reading
The Power of Teaching Star-Crossed Love Stories
Close Reading Strategies for Success
5 Must-Read Gothic Short Stories for High School Students
As students read each Gothic text, they can begin to build a list of identifying traits and then create their own definitions of the Gothic genre. I like to have students create a definition essay as a culminating assignment for the unit; alternatively, students can construct a presentation and/or write their own original short stories using the traits they’ve observed from texts in the unit.
Here are five must-read Gothic short stories for high school students.
Adding Diversity to British Literature: Text Lists by Theme
The Canon of British Literature, as we know, consists of a homogenous group that does not reflect the rich multicultural world of Great Britain today. As a result, any survey of British Literature oftentimes becomes a skewed representation of the literary diaspora of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
Five Ways to Infuse Humor into Your ELA Curriculum
Let’s face it, most great works of literature are heavy, and those are the ones we typically teach. Why is that? Probably because the moments of great pain and agony in life are the ones that have the most profound impact us. Ergo, we teach Hamlet or Macbeth over The Comedy of Errors. Or, we teach heart-wrenching memoirs such as A Long Walk to Water over Bossypants. I find that my students sometime ask me why all great literature is so dark and why we have to talk about death, violence, tragedy, and depression so often when there’s so much of that in the world already.
Zombie-Inspired Assignments for Secondary ELA... Because Zombies are COOL
PowerPoint Party: A Fun Persuasion Game
In their pure sense, PowerPoint Parties started becoming popular due to COVID, and friends/ family members would get together (albeit virtually) to present a PowerPoint on a topic of interest. This eventually morphed into a fun game for high school and college-age students (is it ok for me to add “drinking game” in here?). Currently, PowerPoint Parties have become popular on TikTok, which provided the inspiration for this post. Head over to TikTok and search for “PowerPoint Parties” to find ideas… be forewarned that some of these ideas will not be “school appropriate” but still humorous.
The "Leads to" Thematic Claim Concept
The thesis statement is undoubtedly the MOST important sentence of the entire essay! It serves as the blueprint, or road map, for the essay, so it is crucial that the thesis statement is clear and logical before beginning the body of the essay. The caveat here, of course, is that a thesis statement can and often does change throughout the writing process, but in general, it is always helpful to begin with a solid argument.
Three Necessary Lessons for the Beginning of the Year in ELA
The beginning of the school year is a time to reintroduce students to routine, classroom procedures, and the habits of homework and studying…. but I don’t need to tell you that! For us as English teachers, the beginning of the school year means reviewing and reteaching skills that our students will SWEAR they were NOT taught “last year.” We know the joke; we know that isn’t true!
The Junk Journal Novel Project for Secondary ELA
3 Thanksgiving Activities to Recognize Native Americans
Thanksgiving season provides ELA teachers with the perfect opportunity to engage students in meaningful reading, writing, and speaking activities that can target creative writing, analysis, as well as multiculturalism. It’s an important time of the year not only to give thanks but also to acknowledge both voices in the foundation of the United States: the colonists and the Native Americans.
Literary Analysis Essay Boot Camp
AP Lit Exam Grading 2020: My Main Takeaways
As I graded 500+ essays for the 2020 exam, I created a skills list of roses and thorns (positives and negatives) to help inform our instruction in AP Lit for the upcoming school year using the new rubric. Please note that I am NOT divulging any specific information bout the exam itself in terms of the passages and prompts or any specifics about student essays.
How to Avoid the Summer Slide with Summer Reading Challenges & One-Pager Projects
Three Engaging Plays for High School Students
As high school teachers, we spend most of our drama units on Shakespeare or the standard classics such as Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, or Our Town. While there is nothing wrong with ANY OF THESE CHOICES, here are three plays that we don’t teach as often but make fantastic selections for high school students.
Board but NOT BORING: My Go-to Collaborative Activity for Secondary ELA
Because this collaborative activity is so simple, it has become my go-to strategy throughout the school year to reinforce various skills and units. It’s an excellent tool to use for test-prep (see this post) and to scaffold reading, writing, and speaking skills.