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...
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!
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.
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.
Now, more than ever, it is crucial that we as secondary English teachers work consciously to diversify the cannon. “Imagine a world in which all children can see themselves in the pages of a book.” This is the mission of the organization We Need Diverse Books. We Need Diverse Books has been working towards this goal for a long time, and they provide amazing resources to help teachers do just that.
Jamboard through Google has become a cornerstone tool in my virtual ELA classes because one of my go-to strategies when we had students in class was to use sticky notes on the board. You can read more about the Board but NOT BORING: My Go-to Collaborative Activity for Secondary ELA strategy here.
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.
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!
Book club is now considered to be one of the “best practices” in English Language Arts. Book clubs differ from traditional literary circles in that they are less teacher-directed. The students take on the responsibility of selecting their roles, making their assignments, keeping track of their reading, and much more.
