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
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
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
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
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
Five ESSENTIAL Questions to Guide Textual Analysis
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
Prompt Sticks Reflection Game: An Interactive Way to Reflect Back on the School Year
Tone Tunes: Using Music to Teach Tone in Poetry
The Art of the One-Pager
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
Thanksgiving & Abraham Lincoln: A Rhetorical Analysis Activity
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!