Calling all budding authors, poets, and storytellers in your classes. Writing competitions are a great way to motivate students to write. They give students a real world context for writing and also give students the chance to earn prizes.
Reading Like Writers: Effective Writing Starts with Effective Reading
As reading and writing teachers, we’ve all witnessed the seeming decline of student writing ability over the past years. We find ourselves as teachers pondering what is happening to our youth as standards drop lower and lower. We can certainly place quite a bit of blame on technology as students read less than ever, so reading in our classes is incredibly important.
Heroes and the Hero’s Journey: Lessons and Activities for Your Next Heroism Unit
Book Shelfie Activity to Foster a Love of Reading
The Power of Teaching Star-Crossed Love Stories
Your First FIVE Lessons of the School Year
The first five lessons of a secondary ELA class are essential for setting the tone for the rest of the year. It’s also a stressful time to readjust to school hours, meet new students, and get back into a routine once again. That’s why I’ve put together your first FIVE lessons of the school year. All right here, done for you.
Teaching Poetic Devices with Pop Songs
How to Circumvent ChatGPT and AI CHEATING
Engaging Students with Scavenger Hunts in Secondary ELA
Close Reading Strategies for Success
High-interest Books for Reluctant Readers in Secondary ELA
Should we are should we not teach the classics? I can see both sides to the argument, but with my students that struggle, I defer to the side of practicality and place more importance on getting students to read anything… something… rather than… doing nothing.
That gets us to the point of this post: a list of high-interest books for middle school and high school ELA. These books are sure to get reluctant students to read!
5 Podcast Episodes for Halloween in Secondary ELA
5 Must-Read Gothic Short Stories for High School Students
As students read each Gothic text, they can begin to build a list of identifying traits and then create their own definitions of the Gothic genre. I like to have students create a definition essay as a culminating assignment for the unit; alternatively, students can construct a presentation and/or write their own original short stories using the traits they’ve observed from texts in the unit.
Here are five must-read Gothic short stories for high school students.
5 Keys to Student Motivation
Amazon Prime Day 2022-- Mega Sale on Items for Secondary ELA
Adding Diversity to British Literature: Text Lists by Theme
The Canon of British Literature, as we know, consists of a homogenous group that does not reflect the rich multicultural world of Great Britain today. As a result, any survey of British Literature oftentimes becomes a skewed representation of the literary diaspora of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
Tips for Transitioning to Teaching High School English
Are you a member of the Bespoke ELA Facebook group for high school English teachers? I created this group in order to build a virtual network of teachers, and it has quickly become an indispensable resource for me throughout the years. Click here to go over and join.
Five Ways to Infuse Humor into Your ELA Curriculum
Let’s face it, most great works of literature are heavy, and those are the ones we typically teach. Why is that? Probably because the moments of great pain and agony in life are the ones that have the most profound impact us. Ergo, we teach Hamlet or Macbeth over The Comedy of Errors. Or, we teach heart-wrenching memoirs such as A Long Walk to Water over Bossypants. I find that my students sometime ask me why all great literature is so dark and why we have to talk about death, violence, tragedy, and depression so often when there’s so much of that in the world already.
End of the Year Note Ideas for Students
At the end of the school year, I always find myself wanting to convey to my students everything that they’ve meant to me over the course of the school year. I want them to know that I care— even if it was a difficult year for the student in my class. I want them to remember that they had an English teacher who believed in them and wants the best for them.
