This year, I’ve been making a point to try new and engaging ways to offer mini lessons to my students. In my last post, I discussed how I used samples from my students’ warm-up writing project to help students elevate their sentences. My next creative idea came during homecoming week on “Barbenheimer Day,” where students […]
Author: Paige Timmerman
Making Mini Lessons Engaging: A Barbenheimer Themed Challenge
This year, I’ve been making a point to try new and engaging ways to offer mini lessons to my students. In my last post, I discussed how I used samples from my students’ warm-up writing project to help students elevate their sentences. My next creative idea came during homecoming week on “Barbenheimer Day,” where students […]
Instant Mini Lessons: Using Student Writing Samples in Revision
Don’t you love it when, as a teacher, you can make yourself obsolete? That’s exactly what I intended to do in my first writing project of the year. In conjunction with The New York Times Coming of Age in 2023 contest, I wanted my students to write a scene about their lives where the reader […]
First Year Writing Teacher Support: Just Try It!
If you’re like me, you always have a project in the back of your mind that you want to try, but for whatever reason, you never pull the trigger. You keep telling yourself it will be a great project for the next unit, the next semester, the next year. But this is a warning for […]
First Year Writing Teacher Support: Reserve Time for Revision
Hang in there, new teacher, you’re almost to the finish line. By this point in the school year, you’ve definitely had your students write a thing or two. So you now know that getting students to write perfectly polished drafts is a lot harder than meets the eye. I know when I first started teaching, […]
First Year Writing Teacher Support: Your Moves Are Not Their Moves
As writing teachers, we’ve done our fair share of writing ourselves. We each have our own unique process, a set of strategies we’ve grown comfortable with from practice. If you’re new to teaching writing, that probably means you did a lot of writing recently in college. Your process is finely tuned; you’re likely a well-oiled […]
First Year Writing Teacher Support: Use Your Resources
As a first year teacher, I was so excited to teach writing. When I sat down to plan my year the summer before it started, I had so many writing units planned. I wanted my students to write paper after paper, knowing they needed the practice but also hoping they would begin to view writing […]
First Year Teacher Support: Telling Yourself, “It’ll Buff”
There’s a saying a lot of students at my school use. If something unfortunate happens that they want to shake off— they’re having a bad day, they drop their iPad on the floor, they accidentally bump into someone on the way into class— you might hear them say it. When I first heard the expression, […]
5 Super Affordable Things I Wish I Had as a New Writing Teacher
I love reading New Year’s listicle articles. It’s fun to look back on the Top 10 best films of the past year and look forward to the Top 22 Things to Do in 2022. So with the new year approaching in just a few days, I thought I’d jump on the bandwagon and offer you […]
First Year Teacher Support: The Power of Talk
When I decided to write a blog for new teachers, I should have begun with this piece of advice. What I’m going to share with you is nothing new or nuanced. I’m sure other teachers (myself included) have already said this 1,000 times on this blog. There are whole books on this topic that dive […]
moving writers 