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...
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.
The beginning of the school year is an important time to assess the writing skill levels of new students in our English classes. One way to do this is to assign a diagnostic essay in order to "diagnose" each student's writing level.
The first rule of Book Club is: you do not talk about Book Club. The second rule of Book Club is: you DO NOT talk about Book Club! Kidding. The only rule of Book Club is: DO IT...
Contrasting literary movements as a pedagogical approach to teaching literature is a debatable method, but I have found that juxtaposing literary movements...
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...
The holiday break is OVER, and it’s time to face the reality that we have 5-6 more months left of school. So the question is: How do we get through the next 5 months without getting burnt out?
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...
The season of Christmas is upon us, and it is a season of the year that has inspired the setting of many iconic pieces of literature. The religious iconography of the holiday symbolizes themes of rebirth, renewal, sacrifice, forgiveness, grace, and the archetypal character of the chosen one...
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...
One of the most important skills we teach across all content areas, not just in English class, is how to comprehend complex texts. It is probably the most crucial skill that we can teach in our classrooms because...
First of all, this title has multiple meanings, but the purpose of this blog is to give some useful tips to teacher-authors who need help managing, organizing, and growing their TpT shops...