Mentoring: Dashes Originally uploaded by teachergal I strategized a bit today about how to help my student understand how to use dashes. I used the About.com piece (that I referenced in my previous blog post) to help me create a five column chart to help my student look for dashes in the books she's reading… Continue reading The Hunt for Dashes
Category: mentor texts
Dashing Around to Find Dashes
During Family-Teacher Conferences, one of my students mentioned that she wanted to know "what that line was" that Harper was using throughout Just Grace, a book I lent her. I figured she meant the dashes, and once she showed it to me, I realized my hunch was correct. Then my student said, "I want to… Continue reading Dashing Around to Find Dashes
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Kids As Mentors
I'm getting ready for Family-Teacher Conferences tomorrow. As I do, I'm putting together folders for each family, which includes the following things: A reading & word work assessment profile with each student's score and the benchmarks The most recent math test Each student's most recent on-demand assessment (for personal narrative) Suggestions for helping students with… Continue reading Kids As Mentors
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Become Your Students’ Writing Mentor
Every writer needs a real writer to look up to. Why not allow your students' favorite author be, well, YOU!??! By building up an arsenal of texts you created, with and without your students in-mind, you will have lots of writing to pull-from when you identify a trouble-spot in their writing. I did just that… Continue reading Become Your Students’ Writing Mentor
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The Craft Table for A SWEET SMELL OF ROSES is complete!
I dissected Angela Johnson's Book, A Sweet Smell of Roses, to the best of my ability today. I created wordy teaching points so you can truly help your students to see what craft moves Johnson made (at least, the ones I think she made). This will help you show the writers in your classroom how… Continue reading The Craft Table for A SWEET SMELL OF ROSES is complete!
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Have you used this mentor text?
I've been toting around Those Shoes a lot when I'm conferring with my students lately. I'm teaching them things like how to vary sentence lengths and ways to incorporate precise language into their personal narratives by showing them multiple places in Boelts' Text where she does these things. However, late last week, when I was… Continue reading Have you used this mentor text?
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Start Photocopying Student Work Before Its Published!
Sometimes I think we forget to preserve our students' writing work as they're going through the writing process. Too often, I've forgotten to photocopy a great timeline or a first draft in which the child goes back, using revision strategies, adding more or taking huge chunks away with scissors or a thick marker. So this… Continue reading Start Photocopying Student Work Before Its Published!
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Personal Narrative Texts.
In many of the classrooms I'm working in, we are moving into a Personal Narrative study. I asked teachers to gather books they would like to use to anchor their teaching. Below is a list of some of the texts: A Tree Named Steve by Alan Zweibel and David Catrow Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good,… Continue reading Personal Narrative Texts.
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This is the only kind of jogging you’re going to see me do!
Kevin, Creator of Day in a Sentence, used a new technology, Jog the Web, to showcase everyone's posts this week. I was fascinated with the ease at which I was able to navigate through the websites of the Day in a Sentence Contributors. In fact, I liked Kevin's Jog so much that I created a… Continue reading This is the only kind of jogging you’re going to see me do!
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Meta-Language for Talking About Texts
I was just reviewing my notes from the course I took with Lucy at the TCRWP Summer Writing Institute last month. I came across a page of notes I took where Lucy summarized the best way she knows of to talk about texts with kids. I reviewed it and tried to make it my own.… Continue reading Meta-Language for Talking About Texts
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Poll – Early Results
From the looks of the poll I posted two days ago, it looks like people would like more posts about "units of study" and "using mentor texts" in writing classrooms. Since the poll is open until the 20th of August, we didn't want to start posting about one thing (e.g., mentor texts) like wild and… Continue reading Poll – Early Results
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SOLS: Mine Forever.
Prior to adult writing time, I read aloud Jamie Lee Curtis' book, Tell Me Again About the Night I was Born. Then, thinking about SOLSC today, I decided to attempt to write about being given my son. It didn't work out so well as a narrative, so I switched genres. Here it is, in a… Continue reading SOLS: Mine Forever.
