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Persuasive Writing: a pre-writing activity Often when we announce that we are assigning an essay we get some groans and eye rolls. I try to circumvent that with some persuasive writing activities that get my students excited (or at least somewhat interested) in the art of persuasion.  Before we … [Read more...] about Persuasive Writing: a pre-writing activity

Expository Writing: Teaching Kids to Inform & Explain So you are teaching expository writing and here's the outcome for your students: Write arguments to support claims in an analysis of substantive topics or texts, using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence. It sounds a … [Read more...] about Expository Writing: Teaching Kids to Inform & Explain

Preventing fear of failure in our students is such an important part of our job. I'm sure that many of you have had "failures" in your life that taught you some important lessons. I know I certainly do. As adults, we can usually look back and understand that the pain that may have come with … [Read more...] about Preventing Fear of Failure

Student Apathy:  I know you feel it. Kids are just not as easy to engage these days. In fact, dealing with student apathy is one of our biggest challenges. We can blame it on a lot of things, but that just won't get us anywhere other than worked up and discouraged. Instead, what can we do about … [Read more...] about Dealing with Student Apathy

Today was an action-packed class, with lots of engagement from my students. We were learning about brainstorming with candy and about the speaking and listening process. It was a perfect way to spend a full moon Friday the 13th together! The class had two distinct sections today, starting … [Read more...] about Lesson Planning in Room 213: Speaking, Listening & Brainstorming with Candy

Hello, there! If you've been following along, all week I've been sharing the things that I've been doing with my students. It's only our second week, so the students are learning about my expectations for reading and writing workshop - and about the importance of word choice. Yesterday, I did … [Read more...] about Lesson Planning in Room 213: BUILDING WORD CHOICE

This is my first full week with my students so we started with some warm up activities and ones that get us started and organized. Today, I'm ready to start focusing on how authors use word choice deliberately. My students are seniors, so much of what I'll cover over the next few classes is not … [Read more...] about Lesson Planning in Room 213: The importance of word choice

Welcome back to the second part of my series where I'm giving readers a closer look at  lesson planning in Room 213. Yesterday, I shared a spoken word poem by Matthew Foley to get my students thinking about being truly "present" in class - as well as to see what they knew about word choice and using … [Read more...] about Lesson Planning in Room 213: Starting reading and writing workshop

I've heard from my readers that they'd like to see me write about what a day actually looks like in my classroom, so I'm planning some posts that do just that with some lessons for the first week in school. But first, a little background: My seniors' first major assessment will be a … [Read more...] about Lessons for the first week of school

Where do I start with reading workshop? I get this question a lot, and it's not surprising. If you have never run a reading workshop in your secondary classroom, starting one can be very overwhelming.  Recently I shared a bunch of blog posts on Instagram with those who were unsure of the … [Read more...] about Reading Workshop: Where Do I Start?

Are you feeling stress about setting up a classroom? I'm so sorry if you are.   I feel the need to write about this after reading many comments from new teachers (and some vets) who are feeling absolutely stressed and inadequate right now because they are on social media, seeing pictures and … [Read more...] about Setting Up a Classroom: What you REALLY need