Originally published December 17, 2017. “Hello? Has someone joined the call? Welcome,” my sister says after the musical tone (indicating someone new is on the line) sounds. I giggle and say, “It’s me. Sarah.” “The author!” says my other sister who was already on the …
Our seventh grade class began the final quarter of our year together with a closer look at rhetoric, specifically how a speaker earns the audience’s attention and trust (ethos), how a speaker moves an audience to feel (pathos), and how the speaker persuades and teaches the audience with jargon, facts, examples in the hopes that those who listen will consider the issue in a new way or be moved to act (logos).
“So the speaker is saying that she wishes her mother would have left her courage behind instead of her brooch.Can you relate this poem to another poem or story?” says Jonathan. “Yes, Andy*?” “This reminds me of a movie, Guardians of the Galaxy.” “What makes …
Most days in my junior high and college writing classes we begin with a quick write. I call them “Compose for 7’s” because we write for seven minutes, and our intention is to use that time to compose something that we can get into, explore, …
You carefully modeled complex sentences. You even organized this great activity where you cut large strips of text with subordinating conjunctions and independent clauses. You asked a student to color in 4-inch periods and commas during homeroom. Using their bodies, students created complex sentences with …
A few evenings ago, I posted the following message on my Facebook page: Educators: Stop filling “gifted” students’ heads with biases against “regular” students. The problem is yours, and you’re infecting children with it. Comments immediately popped up. One woman wrote that this had happened …
School started on Wednesday. We started our time together talking about the differences and similarities between “liking” and “appreciating” books. We did not take notes on this discussion, but the more we talked about the denotation and connotation, the more we came to understand the …
For the past few years, choice reading has been the foundation of my reading pedagogy because choice values students as human beings with a range of interests, experiences, and tastes and because choice shares the responsibility of teaching with all the readers and books in …
It was a lovely afternoon in Parma, Michigan. Clear skies guided our walk from Western High School’s gym where we’d just listened to Meg Medina, Pernille Ripp, Chad Everett, Sara Ahmed, and Donalyn Miller give their seven-minute Nerd Talks, each a call-to-action. We carried their …
I have just returned from the first Summit on the Research and Teaching of Young Adult literature at UNLV (#yasummit2018, Steve Bickmore). In this unique professional development experience, authors, researchers, teachers, librarians, and school administrators came together for three days to discuss how we can make …