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...
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.
In their pure sense, PowerPoint Parties started becoming popular due to COVID, and friends/ family members would get together (albeit virtually) to present a PowerPoint on a topic of interest. This eventually morphed into a fun game for high school and college-age students (is it ok for me to add “drinking game” in here?). Currently, PowerPoint Parties have become popular on TikTok, which provided the inspiration for this post. Head over to TikTok and search for “PowerPoint Parties” to find ideas… be forewarned that some of these ideas will not be “school appropriate” but still humorous.
Love it or hate it, poetry is unavoidable in the secondary ELA classroom. I, for one, am a HUGE lover of poetry but fully acknowledge that it can be annoyingly cryptic at times. Reading poetry reminds us that not all texts are meant to be beat "with a hose to find out what [they] really mean" like in the Billy Collins poem "Introduction to Poetry."
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!
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.
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.
