I accept that it is going to be a few more days until I can connect my desktop.  I accept that I cannot blog from school.  I accept that I have a limited amount of time after school before morphing into Mom and am unable to go to a library to blog.  So I keep… Continue reading Ruth’s SOLS: Connected!

Often on Friday afternoons, my youngest two kids and I will stop at an old fashioned general store in a tiny town on our way home.   We park alongside the railroad tracks.  When we're really lucky, a train will pass. "I love trains," the youngest will say.  Naturally followed by, "And bong clocks and bowling." … Continue reading Ruth’s Slice: Gummy Worms.

Stacey and I often talk about the power of comments.  The long and the short of it all is this:   Comments matter.  A lot. With that said, we've been ecstatic about the number of people who have chosen to become "Slicers" this month.   We've been even more excited about the number of people who have… Continue reading comments matter!

No video drawing this week, I had to use more archaic measures.  It went like this: Checked the number of comments and subtract one (since Stacey isn't eligible to win our own giveaway!) Said to Andy (my sweet husband), "Hey, choose a number between 1 and 10." "Seven!"  (It strikes me that it says something… Continue reading And the Winner Is . . .

Today my students took a summative assessment over the novelsthey read for their literature circles.  There were four parts to include in the letter, which aligned with the kinds of notes they took in preparation for their discussions.  Then, as a conclusion, I asked them to tell me something about their lives right now.  Wow!  I… Continue reading Reading Response Letters.

So we've been studying persuasion in my ninth grade English class.  Since my students were required to write a persuasive piece, I placed the same expectation on myself.  I'm "getting away" using this as my Memoir Monday post because I used a narrative scene as evidence to support my claim.  I was inspired by my November… Continue reading Ruth’s Memoir-ish Monday: Give Choice a Chance

Terri left the following comment on a recent post, "Tracks of Teaching." I was just thinking of this very thing this morning.  How do you assess kids on what you have taught if none of it is evident?  For example, I taught a unit of study on narrative poetry.  A student turned in an essay… Continue reading messy assessment 🙂

I've always been a big believer that the "tracks of teaching" should be evident when walking into a classroom.  By this, I mean that if I simply scan the walls of a classroom, I should be able to know what has been studied.  Right now, if you would enter the classroom I teach in, you… Continue reading tracks of teaching.