Memory Chains: A Strategy for Writer’s Notebooks
Here’s a fun strategy you can try to generate writing in your notebook this summer. Come back-to-school time, you can teach your students how to use this strategy if they get stuck.
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Let’s Pretend!
We encourage fantasy play at choice time and outdoor play. We teach readers to pretend to be characters as they read. When role-playing is a natural and essential part of childhood, why wouldn’t we encourage our young writers to make-believe?
Watching Our Word Wall Come Alive
Read this post for the story of one classroom’s creative celebration of word wall words.
Write to the Finish!
It’s the final countdown to summer for me and my third graders. Here are some ways we’ve used writing to end the year in a meaningful way.
Tuesday Slice of Life Story Challenge
Welcome to the Tuesday Slice of Life Story Challenge!
Personalizing charts to foster intention and independence
More and more, another way we’ve been making sure that charts become part of our writers’ toolbelts is to create individual ones that are either the same as the ones on the wall or close enough that they don’t require instruction for students to access.
OLW Check-In: Note
How’s your OLW going this year? Mine has been popping up again recently and reminding me to make more of an effort.
Enlisting Writing Support from Parents
Parents can be a tremendous educational resource. Yet, in middle school it can be challenging, as developmentally our students are beginning to morph from children into young adults. Thinking about next year, I have drafted some ideas for partnering with parents on how to help their kids become stronger writers. How might parents provide support in the way writing workshop teachers believe is most helpful? Here are a few ideas…
Scaffolding Student Blogging: Setting Students Up For Success
Using what we know about best practice and scaffolding writers, our blog writing begins.
Tuesday Slice of Life Story Challenge
Welcome to our community or writers, readers, and commenters.
One Line a Day
One reason we write is to help us remember. As a result, a line-a-day journal is a great way to inspire kids to write daily all summer (and maybe all year) long.
Six REAL Purposes For Kids to Write This Summer and Beyond
We do all we can to keep kids writing over summer. But are we assigning tasks and busywork, or actually enriching their writerly lives?
I’ve created a tool to share with families and students of all ages to inspire writing for REAL purposes this summer and beyond.
Teach Kids How To Teach Minilessons
Teaching kids how to teach a minilesson might be easier than you think.
Patterns of Power: Review + Giveaway
At a time when thoughts turn to sandy beaches and alarm clock-less days, it takes a very special professional book to make me wish (at least a little) that it was September and I could start implementing all these fabulous, fun and important lessons now! Patterns of Power: Inviting Young Writers into the Conventions of Language is a book that will make you happy to have the opportunity to be a teacher, working with young writers to help them explore, wonder, and apply the conventions they learn. It’s a book that I believe will transform how teachers and students look at conventions
Tuesday Slice of Life Story Challenge
Welcome to the Tuesday Slice of Life Story Challenge!
A few ideas for conferring
Potentially, one of the most impactful opportunities we have for making a lasting difference on our students as writers is when we pull up next to them and confer with them. It’s SO worth spending some time reflecting, setting goals, and developing tools and strategies for the conferring work we do as teachers.
Spontaneous Sparks
My students got extra creative when we used some extra time in a spontaneous way!
End of Year Reflections and June Planning
As we approach the end of another school year, many of us begin making plans for outgrowing ourselves. But what might be some lenses to think through when taking on such a task? I have a few ideas . . .
Making the Writer Better: Getting Started with Blogging
As I move forward in planning summer professional development for the teachers in my district, I am already finding the infographic invaluable. In planning my session, “Getting Started with Blogging” I found the information on the infographic guiding each slide and each step as I planned the presentation.
Slice of Life Tuesday
Tuesdays are Slice of Life days. Welcome to our community or writers, readers, and commenters.