Nancie Atwell calls theme “the chilliest mind Popsicle” of all the writing lessons that young writers need to learn, and I couldn’t agree more. (Atwell, 2015, 101) Theme is one of the toughest lessons I have had to learn to teach in both reading and writing and by the time I did, I not only […]
Choose what’s true for you:
A) It makes complete sense to teach/focus on editing and proofreading after the craft lessons.
B) I wish my students’ writing were rid of niggling errors in basic conventions, especially the ones I have already taught.
If you teach writing, you’re likely very familiar with The Writing Process. Not a (lower-case) writing process: The Writing Process. The exact wording may shift slightly, but essentially it’s the same standard sequence that one must follow in order to fully be a capital W Writer: you plan, draft, revise, edit, and finally, publish. It’s […]
Writing is thinking on paper. Our thinking is the fabric of our minds: our memories of the past, our imaginative hopes for the future.
A few weeks ago, Rebekah and Allison reached out to the Moving Writers crew to coordinate our schedules and topics for this school year. I wanted to respond, but I was feeling more than a little stuck. I had two ideas, but they both felt pretty lame. I was swimming in doubt, so I reached […]
How do we get students to buy into writing? How do we begin to hear their stories. Oral storytelling is a way to engage your writers in a low stakes way and create a basis for a really strong writing community.
Sometimes, there isn’t one right answer. Sometimes it’s okay to admit we don’t know.
This month @mrsablund takes you through the mentor our students know best… social media. How can we use this in our classrooms as writers? Read to find out!
Most struggling students have found themselves failing, and many of these experiences of failure become foundations to future embarrassment. This, then, becomes a huge deterrent to learning when the student begins to default to maladaptive coping mechanisms that serve them at the moment but are detrimental in the long term.
In his 1995 work, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, astrophysicist Carl Sagan wrote a sentence that would be uttered in classrooms around the world for decades to come: “there’s no such thing as a dumb question.” We’ll assume, of course, that Sagan is excluding the students in your class who […]
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