A meeting place for a world of reflective writers.
Anyone who has ever taught research-based writing to upper elementary school students knows, this is hard, but important, work since children need to know — from an early age — that they need to take notes in their own words. Oral rehearsal can help!
Brevity, choice, and routine matter when you’re trying to encourage a reluctant writer to put words on the page when you’re engaging in remote schooling.
Our teaching worlds have been turned upside down. For many of us, every system and structure we’ve had in place for planning, teaching and learning has changed over the past few days. As you find our groove in the new reality, here are some practical suggestions that will help bring the many comforts of your classroom home.
For students, a read aloud is a serious tool. It is a source of building community, language, literacy, and much more. Read alouds offer a lot for the growth of … Continue Reading Read Alouds for Writers
What areas of independence do you wish writers took on more freely in your workshop?
It’s never too early to instill writerly habits. A class idea book will inspire kids to collect seeds for writing everywhere they go (and much, much more!).
From the planning process to the creation, read to find out six ways to make kids the center of your charts–the center of learning.
In a minilesson, we work to not only demonstrate a strategy sometimes employed by professional writers, but also to provide a quick opportunity for young writers assembled before us to apply it, either in their own writing or in a co-authored class composition. This short segment of the minilesson during which writers ‘give a strategy a go’ themselves, often called the “Active Involvement” or “Active Engagement,” allows writers an immediate opportunity for application in the supportive environs of the meeting area. How can we make this part of the lesson really count?
Heart maps can help young writers when they think they don’t have anything to write about.
Digital tools can transform your teaching by allowing students to have a writing community beyond the classroom walls, be innovative, make meaningful connections to other writers and students, have more resources readily available, and have true, authentic reasons for writing.
Janiel Wagstaff’s books will help you teach primary writers about the four types of writing in an engaging way. Leave a comment on this post for a chance to win her series of Stella books.
When students first begin writing their stories they are oral and planned drawings. Eventually, however, letters and words begin to emerge on the page. How do we instruct this change? It … Continue Reading Where Do the Words Go?
Demonstrating that print carries a message is the first and most important step when taking a writer from talking and drawing to writing words.
