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...
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.
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.
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!
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.
This new catch-all acronym has caught hold of the new focused trend in education as a means of emphasizing the fact that as teachers, we do NOT just teach content. We do more than just teach Shakespeare and the Pythagorean Theorem. We also hold the responsibility of training our students how to behave socially and also how to express emotions in a healthy way.
Because this collaborative activity is so simple, it has become my go-to strategy throughout the school year to reinforce various skills and units. It’s an excellent tool to use for test-prep (see this post) and to scaffold reading, writing, and speaking skills.
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.
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.
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.
Writing is a process. It is recursive. No piece of writing is ever "final." Something can always be better. I often feel this way whenever I read back over my own old essays and inevitably find a sentence that could be better, a paragraph that could be stronger, or a word that could be more precise.
