Are your students moaning and groaning over taking another test or writing another essay? While these are tried and true methods for assessing many skills, I have been on a mission to find more innovative, unique ways of assessing student growth and learning.
Best Practices, Close Reading, Essay Writing, Lists, Writer's Notebook
One of the best ways to teach students how to integrate literary and rhetorical devices into their writing is to imitate the style of great writers. Here are 20 Great Literary Quotes to use as Mentor Sentences in Secondary ELA...
Best Practices, Essay Writing, Literature Articles, Reflections on Pedagogy, Writer's Notebook, Freebies
Contrasting literary movements as a pedagogical approach to teaching literature is a debatable method, but I have found that juxtaposing literary movements...
Lesson Planning, Writer's Notebook, Holidays, Close Reading, Poetry, Bundles & Units, Best Practices
This winter season, I found myself missing the snow for the first time in my life because we made a big move from a cold climate where we have lived for the past six years to a warm climate where there is no snow. I never fully realized...
A Facebook friend of mine recently posted the following question: “Where can I go online to create an eye-catching poster for my upcoming show?” 99% of the people who responded said Canva.
When I set out to write the blog article for this week, I didn’t intend on writing about the various acronyms for literary analysis. In fact, I didn’t realize there were quite so many acronyms out there...
Active and purposeful highlighting and annotating is an important skill that can enable greater success in being able to comprehend a text. Of course, there is an ongoing conversation as to whether or not highlighting in particular detracts from comprehension...
I’ll be the first to admit that when I’ve seen other teachers doing interactive notebooks with their students, I thought of them as more of an “art project” than anything educational. But then...
The Writer's Notebook is an essential tool for the ELA classroom as a facilitator for the writing process. It makes the teacher's job easier and more efficient to assign and assess work, and it helps...