Writer's Notebook

Tips for Transitioning to Teaching High School English

Tips for Transitioning to Teaching High School English

Are you a member of the Bespoke ELA Facebook group for high school English teachers? I created this group in order to build a virtual network of teachers, and it has quickly become an indispensable resource for me throughout the years. Click here to go over and join.

Using an Exit Ticket Journal to Check Understanding

Using an Exit Ticket Journal to Check Understanding

Exit tickets are not a new concept, but making them work for you can be time consuming and feel like a chore. Instead of a helpful tool to wrap up a class, they can be a hindrance of extra grading time. So, how can we make exit tickets work in an effective way that won’t take up more of our time than needed but will also give us valuable feedback to guide instruction?

Literary Analysis Essay Boot Camp

Literary Analysis Essay Boot Camp

This year, I have decided to start all of my high school ELA classes with a Literary Analysis Essay Boot Camp. I have discovered over the years that all students in grades 9-12 at all levels need repetitive practice of the same essential writing skills, no matter the grade or level.


Starting the School Year with the College Essay

Starting the School Year with the College Essay

If there is one writing assignment that has real life and real world purpose, it’s the college essay. I have never seen my students more motivated to write and more motivated to work on writing than with this particular assignment. And the reason is simple: this writing assignment truly matters to students.

The Pick Two Assessment:  A Quick Strategy for Comprehension & Analysis

The Pick Two Assessment:  A Quick Strategy for Comprehension & Analysis

If you’re like me, reading checks and quizzes seem to sneak up every week, and I find that I am not always prepared with an assessment.  Coming up with multiple-choice questions or quiz questions takes time, and sometimes, I just need something quick and easy to create.  So, I created the “Pick Two Assessment Strategy” in order to cut down on prep time in creating reading checks and reading quizzes. 

5 Activities to Encourage Creative Thinking in Secondary ELA

5 Activities to Encourage Creative Thinking in Secondary ELA

Here are five ways to encourage creative thinking in secondary ELA while also targeting essential reading and writing skills. Some of these activities are collaborative while others are for independent work. All of these activities can be integrated into the curriculum for any literary unit of study.

5 Innovative Activities & Projects for Any Novel Unit

5 Innovative Activities & Projects for Any Novel Unit

As secondary ELA teachers, there are certain traditional activities that we tend to give our students during a novel study. These activities range from body maps to dialectical journals.

Five ESSENTIAL Questions to Guide Textual Analysis

Five ESSENTIAL Questions to Guide Textual Analysis

Textual analysis can be very confusing when it is anchored or bogged down by esoteric terminology, jargon, and specific devices. This terminology can make textual analysis and close reading and intimidating process for students.

How to get Started with Mentor Sentences

How to get Started with Mentor Sentences

Mentor sentences are an excellent tool to use in the secondary ELA classroom to model essential skills from grammar to literary devices.  They reinforce quality writing skills from published in authors in a positive way rather than the traditional sentence correction method that modeled negative traits.  

8 Ways to Help Students Break Through Writer’s Block

8 Ways to Help Students Break Through Writer’s Block

Writer’s block is real.  It can be the brick wall that stands between success and failure.  And it can be the force that prevents students from completing writing assignments.

Prompt Sticks Reflection Game: An Interactive Way to Reflect Back on the School Year

Prompt Sticks Reflection Game: An Interactive Way to Reflect Back on the School Year

There are lots of creative ways to facilitate reflection at the end of the school year.  Integrating novelty into any lesson makes it more interesting, and the same concept applies to reflection questions.

Tone Tunes: Using Music to Teach Tone in Poetry

Tone Tunes: Using Music to Teach Tone in Poetry

Being able to decipher the tone of a piece of writing is crucial to being able to decipher the thematic message of a text.  This is absolutely true for analyzing poetry.

The Art of the One-Pager

The Art of the One-Pager

One-pagers are all the rage these days. When students process their learning in this fun visual style, the results are powerful.

National Poetry Month: A WHOLE MONTH of Poetry Activities for Secondary ELA

National Poetry Month:  A WHOLE MONTH of Poetry Activities for Secondary ELA

Love it or hate it, poetry is unavoidable in the secondary ELA classroom.  I, for one, am a HUGE lover of poetry but fully acknowledge that it can be annoyingly cryptic at times.  Reading poetry reminds us that not all texts are meant to be beat "with a hose to find out what [they] really mean" like in the Billy Collins poem "Introduction to Poetry." 

Three Famous Christmas Speeches to Inspire Writing

Three Famous Christmas Speeches to Inspire Writing

It's the "most wonderful time of the year" once again!  Every year, the holiday season inspires new movie ideas, and some of these movies go on to become some of the most beloved films of all time with some of the most well-known movie speeches in film history.

Thanksgiving & Abraham Lincoln: A Rhetorical Analysis Activity

Thanksgiving & Abraham Lincoln:  A Rhetorical Analysis Activity

For Thanksgiving this year, I decided to go back to the roots of our celebrated "Turkey Day" to address the fact that the original Thanksgiving had nothing to do with pilgrims or turkeys at all.

The Logline: A Screenwriting Tool that Helps Students with Textual Analysis in both Fiction and Nonfiction

The Logline:  A Screenwriting Tool that Helps Students with Textual Analysis in both Fiction and Nonfiction

In screenwriting (writing for movies and TV), the logline is key to brainstorming story ideas and also selling them or "pitching" them to buyers.  Crafting loglines can help the writer to flesh out new plot ideas before writing the entire script.  It's much easier to revise the logline rather than an entire hundred page script!  

Writing is Recursive, NOT Linear: Free Task Cards Included!

Writing is Recursive, NOT Linear:  Free Task Cards Included!

Writing goes all ways: forwards, backwards, sideways, over there, and over here.  In fact, the only piece of the writing process that occurs at a set point in time is publishing.

Commentary for Literary Analysis:  Four Square Strategy for Success

Commentary for Literary Analysis:  Four Square Strategy for Success

Do you ever see something like this when grading literary analysis essays?

“Frankenstein’s monster says, ‘If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear!’”  This shows that the monster wants to cause fear.”

20 Prompts for Photo-Inspired Writing in Secondary ELA

20 Prompts for Photo-Inspired Writing in Secondary ELA

Photographs are great for inspiring all sort of essay writing from personal narrative writing to literary analysis writing to creative writing. Photographs serve the purpose of inspiring writing in our classes and can be used for writing workshop.