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.
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...
The Writer’s Notebook is the heart of the English classroom. It is the place that holds a student’s reflections on literature and life...
Contrasting literary movements as a pedagogical approach to teaching literature is a debatable method, but I have found that juxtaposing literary movements...
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...
Connecting classic pieces of literature with high-interest modern texts is a great strategy to engage students in the classics while maintaining their interest. Not only that, but intertextuality (making connections between texts) allows students to extend their analysis into a compare/ contrast format that enables them to analyze literary elements and techniques on a deeper level.
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.
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.
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.
One of the things I feel that I don't take enough time to do is show my appreciation for all of my students and recognize their efforts throughout the year. I find that I spend far more time focusing only on my struggling students rather than recognizing each student's individual journey, success, and growth.
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!
Halloween is a season during the school year when we can really engage our students. Secondary students love gothic, horror, and mystery, and Halloween gives us a reason to integrate these literary genres into our curriculums. Halloween provides us an opportunity to target necessary skills with high-interest material.
