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.
How to Build a Writer's Toolkit for Students
8 Ways to Help Students Break Through Writer’s Block
Plagiarism Escape Room: A High-Interest Way to STOP Student Cheating
10 Essential Writing Workshop Supplies from Amazon
5 Ways to Show Your Students YOU CARE This Holiday Season
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.
Thanksgiving & Abraham Lincoln: A Rhetorical Analysis Activity
The Logline: A Screenwriting Tool that Helps Students with Textual Analysis in both Fiction and Nonfiction
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!
6 Spooky and Engaging Halloween Activities & Lessons for Secondary ELA
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.
Commentary for Literary Analysis: Four Square Strategy for Success
20 Prompts for Photo-Inspired Writing in Secondary ELA
TEN Writing Assignments to Build a Writing Community in the Classroom
Blendspace (TES Teach): An Easy Way to Bundle Resources for the Classroom
The Worst Essay of Your LIFE: A Unique Approach to Assessing Writing at the Beginning of the School Year
Support for Struggling Writers: How Essay Interviews can HELP During Writing Workshop
The term “struggling” writer really applies to every single human being. We have all struggled with writing at some point and will continue to struggle moving forward. The difference between successful writers and unsuccessful writers (“success” being defined as students who turn in completed essays that convey meaning effectively versus those who do not) lies in being able to work through frustration.
Motivating Struggling Students with These FIVE Apps to Support the Writing Process
The Essay Shaping Sheet: Friend or Foe?
Essay shaping sheets are essentially templates for writing that guide students through the writing process. A shaping sheet can be as small as a sentence template or as large as an entire paragraph or even essay. But are these tools helpful, or do they ultimately hinder student development? Well, the million-dollar answer to this question is… it depends.
Three High-Interest Writing Assignments to Motivate Struggling Writers
Motivating struggling writers can be quite a challenge. With struggling writers, it is important to create high-interest assignments that students will want to work on, assignments that they will want to put forth the effort on in order to succeed. If struggling students are bored with a writing topic, they won’t be as invested in it and won’t want to put the time and effort in to make it the best it can be.
