"Janie, you have a lifetime of writing. Writing, collecting stories, and sharing with others is a gift of life, and it never ends. Aren't we lucky Janie?"
Category: writing workshop
A Poetry Break: If I Were…
Making space for poetry.
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Book Review: The Journey is Everything by Katherine Bomer
In her brilliant new book, The Journey Is Everything :Teaching Essays That Students Want to Write for People Who Want to Read Them, Katherine Bomer makes a powerful and passionate case for the joyful embrace of a new vision for teaching our students how to write (and read) the essay.
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Emergent Writing and Star of the Day
My son, Alex, will be starting kindergarten this coming September, and I find myself thinking back to what I did to help those four and five year old emergent writers. With rising expectations for what incoming kindergarteners can do, I've been dusting off my kindergarten bag of tricks to work with Alex, to help him feel confident and ready when school starts.
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Watch and Notice
Help your students see the possibilities by writing in front of them
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The Promise of a Writing Maker Space
As I opened my classroom door Friday I knew we would be writing a poem for Mother's Day. I was feeling a bit guilty about the ease and maybe the lack of thought that I had put into the gift this year. As I switched on the lights and straightened books, I thought about Wonderopolis. I entered Mother's Day in the search box and found a wonder on Mother's Day and an invitation to dive into Writing Maker Space!
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Create Your Own Text: Teaching Writing with Mentor Texts
Use a teacher-written mentor text for your next unit of study
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Exploratory Notebooks
Beginning to think about Exploratory Notebooks and easing into a research writing unit.
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Make Writing: A Book Review
Make Writing: 5 Teaching Strategies That Turn Writer's Workshop Into a Maker Space is a "MUST READ" for writing teachers. It is a quick read (less than 100 pages), inspiring, practical, and very current, as "maker spaces" are a hot topic in education today. These strategies can be used with all age levels, bring fresh energy to writing workshop, and allow for more students to find their voices as writers.
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How Do We Develop a Writing Identity?
How can we help students develop identities as writers?
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Planting Seeds for Poetry
Dropping poetry in our classroom silently was like sprinkling seeds and the students (in the classroom and our mentors in Ms. Haseltine's classroom in Virginia) acted as the fertilizer. The students were learning about poetry and becoming poets before we had any lessons. From this point on, our study of poetry became an enlightenment of the curiosity and noticings of the students.
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Protecting Student Writing Time
My students won't become writers just because I want them to be writers. Writers need to wallow in new information, time to let all the words, ideas and questions wash over them, connect with their schema, and let the new information become their own.
